Becoming a Sales Manager

Rahl's quick tour of the Northwest Territory with me was wonderful, and he remained a great tutor. Sony had an office in Seattle for repairing products, so I moved into an office and began my new assignment. Working through distributors was challenging, and I needed to improve my training methods, which were based on training sales people how to sell to customers at the retail level. Distributor sales people had lots of other products they sold to dealers, so I needed to befriend them and show them how to improve their incomes by selling more Sony products. So, we would visit current and potential dealers for me to share my knowledge with them. 

In early 1977 I met Tom Hart of Hart Marketing, who did work for some of my distributors. He and I hit it off and one day we talked about our families and he asked if I had a photo of Georgia. Yes I did, I took it out of my wallet. I handed it to him, commented on her beauty and asked if he could use it and get it back to me? Little did I know that he would bring me the framed painting he made from that small photo, that's hanging on the wall in the photo above. Now it hangs in my command center here in Arizona. We were good friends and worked on many advertising campaigns together, that helped increase sales.

We built local advertisments using the brilliance of Doyle Dane and Burnbach, a leading marketing company and Dan Gallagher, Sony's Marketing Manager.