March 9, 2004: Novell Sales Training Day

Today is the Novell sales training show in Rochester. Min signed up so that she could spend the day with me. This is her first industry show so she is pretty excited. We had to get up early since the show started at 8:30 up at the Marriott Airport (which isn’t anywhere near the airport.)

Novell provided a light breakfast for us. There were supposed to be eleven people in the training session but only eight people arrived. One of our competitor companies was there with four people, we had two and two other companies each had one. So we had a real presence anyway. The Novell guys spent a lot of time talking to us finding out who we were.

The training class went well. I already had last years certification so it wasn’t much different from what I had already done but the classroom setting was nice and covered some things that I didn’t know. Min got a lot out of the day. She didn’t really know what we did with Novell going into the show and now she is really gung ho about them. They provide a really good product range and really fit our business model well so we are hoping to be able to do a lot of work with them in the near future.

Novell provided a nice lunch for us. They forgot to ask if we were vegetarians but luckily I thought of it in time and told the waitress and she had time to alert the chef (yeah, it was a real hotel restaurant meal.) It was a really nice lunch and we managed to make some good contacts there. The Novell guys ate lunch with us so we got to know them a little bit more.

The training went on until about 5:00. It was a whole day thing which is nice because too often these things are way too short for the hours of driving and prep needed to get to them. This was a really valuable day and at the end of the day we got to take the CNS 2004 exams right there so that was really handy as well. So Min should find out whether or not she is CNS Certified in a few weeks. It is really nice that they do it like that. Really works out well for sales staff.

After the seminar, Min and I stopped by Phil and Kate’s place in Henrietta. Phil had to run off to a class (midterms today) so Min and I went down to CompUSA and did some shopping that we needed to get done. We came back and the four of us went down to Friendlys for some dinner. Phil had to run back to class because he had left in the middle of the test to have dinner with us.

Then it was off to the airport to pick up Andy flying in from Puerto Rico. Yup, a whole week there. He is planning on returning to PR on March 25th. He made the arrangements himself so he will probably be actually going then. But he is planning on being in Canada next week so he won’t be joining us for the Friday night game even after he whined and asked us to hold off on the game and wait for him.

We got home and I just had to get to sleep because I have to get up really early in the morning and head down to Pittsburgh with Eric.

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