Consultant fishes for Book Sales, National Jobs from Lakeside
Office
By Charles Nix, Staff Writer, LaGrange Daily
News
Posted: February 4, 1998
The
suits and white shirts closeted at Terry Booton's LaGrange lakeside
home testify to his 18 years with IBM. Now this nationally recognized
sales and marketing consultant dresses in open collared shirts
and sweaters in a spacious home office that looks out over West
Point Lake.
Booton is benefiting from the technology of our times. His
office is just a place for a telephone, fax and computer. In
fact, he's just about stopped sending out printed promotional
material. Instead, when he gets an executive on the telephone,
he asks the executive to pull up his Advanced Marketing Instruction
web site (http://ami.home.mindspring.com/index.html)
so they can
go over it together. Then, if he makes a sale, he gets on an
airplane in
Atlanta and flies to cities around the country.
Booton helps businessmen and industrialists boost sales and
get the right
people in the right job. And he motivates salesmen with keynote
addresses
at national sales meetings. Recently, he self published Cracking
New Accounts, a book of tips and techniques on getting new
business and closing sales. It's been endorsed by Inc.
and Success magazines, national business speaker Zig
Ziglar and several corporations including IBM, American Airlines,
Carlson Travel,
Smith Barney Shearson, NationsBank, Dunn & Bradstreet Information
Services,
Federal Express, and the National Association for Female Executives.
Already written but not published is another book, Calling
on the Top Decision Maker.
You won't find them on the retail store shelves. Booton sells
most of them
himself when he gives a talk or when he goes into a firm with
one of his programs to improve sales and marketing.
Booton is a driver - a type of person he describes in his book
as results oriented. But its not the oppressive aggression of
some salesmen. Instead, Booton assesses personality types in
his approach to a potential client. Booton replaces aggressiveness
with a contagious enthusiasm for the products he's selling,
including himself. "Look at this," he says, jumping
up from the couch, scurring across his upstairs office to a
horseshoe-shaped desk to show how one of the programs works.
He delights in telling how he got past a stalling secretary
to sell his book to an executive who got his book into airport
book stalls. Booton sells computer programs that help determine
characteristics of top performers and then determine where others
fall in relation to those criteria. Other aspects of the program
help managers overcome the age-old problem of putting the best
salesman into a management position, setting him up for failure
because he's a great salesman but doesn't have the personality
for management. It can cost one of the high tech businesses
Booton deals with an average of $400,000 to lose a sales representative.
There's a severance package, possibly a suit and head hunter
fees, but most importantly a territory with a $1 million quota
may be unproductive for four months to a year.
Booton started his career with J.C. Penney Co. After four years
he joined IBM in Huntington, W.Va. He's worked just about every
kind of sales representative job from remote areas of Lexington,
Ky., to handling major accounts. He also was marketing education
and sales school instructor for IBM. When he left the company,
he was in business partner education. Booton's last station
with IBM was Atlanta. He stayed there a couple of months after
he quit to begin his own company, Advanced Marketing Instruction.
But then he and his wife, the former Ginger Norris of LaGrange,
decided it was time for a lifestyle change as well. They had
been looking for lakefront property around Atlanta when Ginger's
mother found two lots on West Point Lake. The Bootons bought
the property and on weekends for a couple of months would sleep
on the boat or at Ginger's parent's house. They finally decided
to move to LaGrange. They built the house, in Creek Ridge subdivision
off New Franklin Road, around their offices, her's in the basement
and his upstairs. She has a local dealership for a line of office
equipment and is local representative for Xerox. Booton found
that he could get to the Atlanta airport from LaGrange in as
little time as it would have taken him living in Atlanta. But
when he returned home there was the lake, wind in the pines
and two dogs to welcome him. He laughs about people who raise
an eyebrow about him going all the way to Columbus shopping,
or even across town to the mall. "There is no traffic here,"
he laughs.
