Office workers are notoriously suspicious of homeworkers, particularly remote sales people when they use their homes as offices, often recorded in diaries and schedules simply as "Working from home". Daytime TV is often half-seriously cited as a likely pastime for such workers, often by office colleagues envious of the fact that their higher paid, free rolling sales team are not anchored to the desk and vending machine coffee culture as they are.
Sitting on the M25 this morning I took a call from one of my account managers and I made a cheap joke about missing daytime TV. It struck me that instead of pestering and teasing remote sales people about their dubious homeworking disciplines, I had the idea that sales managers the world over should embrace the issue and start a new TV channel called Sales TV, The Account Management Channel or similar. In between Ricki Lake style shows where the subject matter could include things like
"My customers think I'm useless"
"I'm in love with my Sales Manager"
"I want a career change"
"My territory sucks"
"Selling to family members, the big taboo"
"I love myself."
"My customer won't return my calls."
we could have informative sales training programmes with remote learning qualifications. There could be also be phone-in talk show where troubled sales people could call in for advice in tricky situations and there might be a scrolling ticker-tape along the bottom of the screen with messages like
"Bob Smith: HEELLLOOO ARE YOU STILL ALIVE? Please call the office immediately, it's been 3 months since we last heard from you"
"Gary Turner: your expenses are overdue AGAIN"
"Joe De Marco: you're fired!".
Actually the more I think about it, the more seriously interesting an idea this idea is becoming. Anyone got the access codes for one of Rupert Murdoch's TV satellites?