I while ago I was interviewing a Sr. Sales VP from one of the biggest consulting companies in the world. He had built a top notch sales department during a 20+ yr run with the company, and was let go as a cost cutting measure because his salary and comissions were now looking like a large overhead expense to the accounting department, not evidence of the value he was providing to his company.

During the interview I was trying to find the angle to use in marketing this talented sales executive to his future employers, and the subject came up regarding his past contacts from when he was a salesman, and not a manager of salesmen. When you are interviewing for a six figure sales position, the interviewer always wants to know how you are going to leverage your existing relationships to bring in new business for your new employer.

This was where this particular interview went south. He said that he had thrown out his rolodex of contacts that he had collected over the years, mostly "C Level" executives from top fortune 1000 companies, large financial institutions, and manufacturing powerhouses, because the file of all of these contacts was taking up too much space in his filing cabinet. I was shocked!!! How could such an exeperienced and succesfull sales executive make such an elementary mistake? How could he throw away the most valuable thing he owned.

He mistakenly believed that he was going to be working for his employer until retirement, after all, the sales department that he had built, trained, and managed was providing sales growth, and profitability for his company. They would never downsize him to save a few hundred thousand dollars. And besides, he wasn't even doing customer calls any more. Those were all handled by his sales staff, and his job was to manage all of the salesmen in the department. Furthermore, he hadn't kept in touch with the large number of executives in his file because he didn't think he needed them anymore. Now, he had no idea where many of them worked, couldn't use them for references, and couldn't call on them for new business.

Now he is looking for a position as an IT or Consulting salesman, or Sales manager, and when the question of whether he has any existing or past clients he can call on comes up, he is at a major disadvantage, and is getting passed over for positions where there is another candidate that can honestly answer that he has current relationships that can bring in new business.

The story of a B2B salesman with no contacts is more common than you would think. How many of us keep our contacts fresh? Send a holiday card, or a birthday card to a customer who's business has put food on our table? Once the sale is over, and we have all moved on, do we still need that customer? Will we ever need that customer?

We just might.