Drift

Whose Side?: Part 2 of 5

You remember your first week. You read the daily briefing twice, asked questions in the morning meeting, wore the shirt like it meant something, because it did. Somewhere along the way, that rep stopped showing up.

Nobody noticed. You didn’t notice. You still hit your numbers, still wore the shirt, still answered the phone with the right words. But something underneath had gone quiet. You were still working at the company. You weren’t working for it anymore. There’s a difference and the customer can hear it.

This is the cave nobody talks about. The customer’s journey is a hill. They climb it once. Yours is a cave, and you have to go back into it every morning before the first appointment. The cave is where you decide, again, that this is your house. That these are your people. That this product line, with all its gaps and all its history and all its imperfect choices, is the one you’re carrying to the door today.

Most reps stop going into the cave by month four. They think the decision they made on day one was enough. It wasn’t. The decision on day one gets you in the door. The decision on day four hundred is what keeps you upright when a customer pushes on something the company doesn’t do.

Here’s the test. When you hear yourself say we about the company, does it mean you, or does it mean them? Listen for it. The rep who says we don’t offer that is standing inside the house. The rep who says yeah, they don’t offer that is standing on the lawn, pointing at the windows. Same words almost. Different posture entirely. The customer reads the posture before they hear the words.

I’ve watched reps drift for years. It’s almost never dramatic. Nobody quits in their head on a Tuesday. It happens in a hundred small concessions. A complaint in the truck that doesn’t get checked. A meeting where you stopped raising your hand. A ride-along where you stopped asking questions because you’d decided, quietly, that you already knew. Drift is what happens when you stop choosing.

You can come back. That’s the whole point. The drift isn’t terminal. But you have to notice it, and you have to do the unglamorous work of getting back to where you belonged. Not back to the honeymoon. Back to the decision. The one you made before you knew enough to be cynical.

A company isn’t a building. It’s a posture you take, every morning, before the first knock. You either take it or you don’t. And the customer at door number one this afternoon is going to know which.

Did you decide today, or did you just show up?

Song pairing: Get Back — The Beatles