ON THE ROAD AGAIN!
M
Whatever sports discipline you work in there will be many days when you are up with the lark and to bed with the nightingale! Your members, committee and players chunter on about the state of the greens, the lack of grass on your pitch and a plethora of other mindless ‘issues’! Through it all you remain cool, calm and collected (albeit whilst seething inside) and smile in all the right places.
And then the sales rep turns up in his shiny new 4x4. He may well have made an appointment - he may even have something you need - but you are in the middle of something really important and his mere existence is enough to make your blood boil.
So what is it really like for these ‘nine to fivers’ with their perceived high wages, commission payments and free travel?
Laurence Gale MSc joins the Bernhard sales and demo team on a trip to Ireland.
y induction into the world of sales and demonstration began on a Sunday morning at 9.30am. I was waiting in the service station at junction 5 of the M54, in deepest Shropshire, to be picked up by Gary Woodward, Territory Manager of Bernhard & Co. Our destination was Ireland via the Holyhead ferry. If you think Sunday at 9.30am is bad then spare a thought for Gary who had left his Rugby home at 8.00am. The speed of his journey, and our subsequent travel, was dictated by his load - two grinders, an Express Dual and Anglemaster 3000, weighing close to a tonne, and being transported in a not inconsiderable sized trailer! Four hours later we arrived in Anglesey to catch the 1.00pm Dun Laoghaire ferry. The crossing was unusually calm and we docked at 5.00pm. With our grinders in tow we slowly headed off to the north of the fair city of Dublin to collect two more of the Bernhard team, UK Sales Manager, Steve Nixon, and Technical Training Manager, Ben Taylor, from the airport. To add to what had already
been a long day, their flight was delayed and they eventually met up with us at 7.00pm. But, our day of travel wasn’t anywhere near over! We had a further three and a half hour journey to County Mayo on the west coast, and the little town of Claremorris. We eventually settled into our hotel at just before 11.00pm, fifteen hours after Gary had set off from Rugby.
The purpose of all this effort was a series of demonstrations by the Bernhard team at four golf courses in Ireland. The four day tour had been organised by Kevin Broderick, Sales Director of one of the country’s leading machinery dealers, Brodericks Grass Machinery, with assistance from the Golf Course
Superintendents Association of Ireland (GCSAI). After a much needed good night’s sleep we were all up bright and early with Kevin joining us for breakfast. Our first port of call was Ballingrobe Golf Club, an 18 hole, par 73 course that Padraig Harrington rates as “the best championship course on the west coast”. Whilst Gary set up the grinders in the Greenkeepers
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