It’s not easy being a salesperson. The pressure to deliver and the constant rejection requires resilience. Here’s my survival guide
Spare a thought for a few commercial folk in transport right now, as Christmas beckons and with it the bearer of good or bad tidings. At the time of writing, the outcome of the London Overground tender is due any day now, hot on the heels of the recent shortlisting at the pre-qualification phase of bidders for the operation of Manchester Metrolink services – a contract currently held by Keolis. In bus, the decision on the first tranche of the Liverpool franchising tender is imminent, whilst the process is in full flow in West Yorkshire, with transport company bid teams juggling resources between this opportunity and the latest round of tenders in Manchester.
Industry awards ceremonies tend to showcase operational deliverers and innovators (once again, I must say, last month’s UK Bus Awards was outstanding and THE best event in public transport). However, there’s a need to give more kudos to commercial folk, those whose performance can be so clinically defined by whether they are in the winning team or if they have won new business through other means. Operations, marketing and customer service folk can play one metric off against another, for instance, customer satisfaction survey scores might be down, but so too are complaints, whilst there’s a whole host of hugely complex reasons why patronage may be suffering. However, for commercial teams, it can be a thankless task, particularly as they make many personal sacrifices during the period of bidding – long trips across the country or overseas to build market intelligence or meet contracting authorities and late nights in the weeks before bid submission. There was a time, when rail re-franchising was in full flow, that the ‘reward’ for a bid director was the prospect of running the company if they won, but those days have gone, and in bus not everyone would necessarily see running a depot in St Helens or The Wirral as a career incentive.
It’s not just the commercial bods at the transport operating companies who need more acknowledgement, but those within the extensive supplier base as well. As someone who has undertaken commercial roles and assignments for transport owning groups and subsidiaries, as well as for large suppliers to these businesses and the companies that I have owned, I’m unsurprisingly in favour of the light being shone on us folk.
In the last two months, a couple of my pals have each set themselves up as lone consultants, having left the security of employment at bus and rail companies. They asked for my advice on whether it was a wise move on their part and how to make a go of it. ‘Rollercoaster’ was my immediate response – your nerves and emotions are on the edge, a favourable lead, a small bit of business won, can create euphoric feelings and great satisfaction, so too if, like me, you are able to eventually sell your business, as I did to an AIM-listed company. But, for all the highs there are many lows – emails that go unanswered when pitching for work, treated with disdain by some employees in a few companies who, in normal circumstances, might be several levels below you in an organisational structure and invoices that take ages to get paid.
My advice to anyone in a sales role in public transport is to have broad shoulders but also recognise that the more you put in, the more you get out of it. The greater the effort you exude to create a big pipeline or to reach out and meet people, improve the quality of your sales prospectus or your bid writing skills, or just the way you present yourself, the greater your chances of success. There’s no room for coasting in the way, frankly, I think you can get away with in a non-sales role in other parts of public transport. Every minute counts.
It’s vital that those in sales reflect on the need for them to be rounded. There are some stuck-up, self-absorbed, transport employees with tickets on themselves, who dismiss salespeople, considering them to be at rock bottom of the food chain. I have seen many a new commercial person experience some kind of inferiority complex because they perceive that they don’t have the power in any relationship and are in a position of subservience. The fact is that us sales folk are more often, than not, the risk takers, the entrepreneurs. Those on the receiving end of our pitches, may well, in this situation, have more power, but they just like us, are trying to create a livelihood. Your role in sales is complex, requiring not just industry knowledge in order to be a credible, engaging and empathetic listener, but more importantly self-awareness and emotional intelligence, a commodity that is utterly alien to many of those who won’t give you the time of day.
Being able, as an ‘industry expert’, to do some of the assignments that you are discussing with prospective buyers is also important, because it helps create greater empathy and not to be unfairly demeaned as ‘just a travelling salesperson’. There’s nothing wrong of course in being a ‘travelling salesperson’ (as I was once referred to), particularly the ‘travelling’ aspect. My advice to my mates and indeed anyone involved in business development, right up to those leading big teams, is that being mobile is imperative. You must be prepared to rack up mileage, spending time and money on lunches and dinners with prospective clients, wherever they may be. Early in my ‘sales’ career, my former business partner said to me ‘no meeting is ever wasted’ and he was spot on. Even the most seemingly pointless meeting with someone you might never think has no mutual benefit, can provide a tiny piece of insight or a connection that might at some stage have legs. Over the years, my wife has often asked why I am travelling to opposite end of the country, staying in some hovel of a hotel just to have a coffee with someone – ‘you’re flogging yourself’, ‘can’t you do it on Teams?’, ‘no one else is doing that’ and I always retort, football manager style, ‘trust the process’.
My former business partner said to me ‘no meeting is ever wasted’ and he was spot on
I’m not saying I’ve cracked it. Last week was more rollercoaster than following Crystal Palace. On Monday, I emailed 30 big businesses offering discounted bus travel for their employees (an easy sale, surely?) and by Tuesday, I’d only received three replies, phoned a non-league football club and offered their season ticket holders cheap travel and then said the bus company wanted to spend several thousand pounds on corporate hospitality, only to be told “our fans don’t like buses and we’re not taking offers of sponsorship or deals” (you couldn’t make it up). Then, after a waffling pitch, a longstanding industry colleague told me he wasn’t parting with £200 for his business and basically, in his view, my latest venture was nothing short of harebrained. For all, these setbacks – and this comes with experience of not letting the defeats set you back – my response to my old colleague was to book a day to wander the streets of his area and utterly prove him wrong and on the other lukewarm responses, I just got straight back into my black book for more mass pipeline development. By Wednesday, two victories were achieved and as I made my long way home from deepest Lancashire to Surrey on Friday, workload, rather than a lack of leads, was the issue. But, like following Palace, you’re only as good as your last win and the spectre of defeat is never far away.
Whilst ‘selling’ isn’t for the faint-hearted and it can be demoralising at times, there are those highs, such as winning an opportunity, however big or small or of strategic value that are exhilarating. However, there are also those moments that aren’t immediately obvious or necessarily of monetary value, and are often only apparent on reflection. They are those dinners or meetings you have where you are on the train home and you realise you’ve not done any sales pitching whatsoever, maybe even turned down an opportunity and just spent most of the time enjoying the company of someone who you consider a mate and just indulging in industry gossip. Indulging in tittle tattle is by the way is important, despite these sanitised times in which we reside. Deep down everyone still enjoys a chinwag about scandals and shenanigans or let off steam about rogues in the industry and, let’s face it, there’s a few out there who are the ‘gift that keep giving’.
The ‘art of selling’ has changed over time. CRM systems have become integral to the landscape for medium to large businesses. I’ve tended to be a bit sceptical of these – I banned their use in a couple of managing director roles I’ve undertaken. I’d seen too many salespeople hesitant about contacting many prospects because they didn’t want to have to be then burdened with the administration of writing up the engagement on a software package. So too, I think sub-consciously if you are too enslaved by a database or spreadsheet, you’re in danger of instinctively treating your prospective customers as a number or mechanising in your mind what should be a deep relationship. I tend to find that those who are so obsessed with being led by their CRM system are the same folk who take a scripted approach to any sales engagement with pre-rehearsed, robotic AI-style phrases. I could never fill in the box on a CRM database after each meeting that could explain the nuances and nonsense of what I’d discussed with one of my sales leads.
Another change to have emerged has been the increasing importance of using LinkedIn as a brand development tool, but at the same time, it’s impact for direct selling and lead generation has diminished. This has been a result of the frequency of automated direct messaging – go through your inbox and I bet its full of requests to sell products that are utterly unsuitable for you or your business. People have now switched off to these. Email contact is, I believe, getting harder – maybe it’s just me, but common courtesy has gone out the window – you can spend an hour or two shaping a personalised email, but you know it will get ignored. There’s a couple of organisations in the transport sector that are harder to get into than Fort Knox for suppliers. They think that the normal rules of decency and politeness don’t apply to them. With each unanswered email, I just get more determined.
Whilst the power of LinkedIn and email may be diminishing, WhatsApp’s fast becoming the definitive tool – easy for everyone to use quickly, capable through voice-note of getting positive emotion across and not relying on unreturned calls or telephone tennis and of course, the joys of double blue-ticks that tell you if your message has been read and if you’re being snubbed!
Last, but not least – in fact, it’s the most important aspect. Business development is about giving and not taking. Whether it’s a big tender or a tiny piece of work you’re going to deliver yourself, providing a great service, surpassing the expectations of the wonderful person or organisation that’s given you the chance, is of unbridled importance. So too, be grateful for those who have commissioned you, make sure you thank them profusely, keep reminding them how appreciative you are and always give back into the relationship, such that meetings with an intention to generate business should ultimately be the last thing on your mind. Be there for them when they want to pour their hearts out about their own fears and frustrations, or if they want to bounce ideas off you or, most importantly, if they fall on hard times in their career and need your help. And don’t forget those who turned their nose up at you and treated you with disdain or just ignored you, when you tried your luck with some sales patter. Like sporting success, career fortunes for all are cyclical and even themselves out over time. Your day will come.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alex Warner has over 30 years’ experience in the transport sector, having held senior roles on a multi-modal basis across the sector. He is co-founder of transport technology business Lost Group and transport consultancy AJW Experience Group (which includes Great Scenic Journeys). He is also chair of West Midlands Grand Rail Collaboration.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
Sales is a lonely and under-valued role
by Passenger Transport on Dec 12, 2025 • 3:04 pm No CommentsIt’s not easy being a salesperson. The pressure to deliver and the constant rejection requires resilience. Here’s my survival guide
Spare a thought for a few commercial folk in transport right now, as Christmas beckons and with it the bearer of good or bad tidings. At the time of writing, the outcome of the London Overground tender is due any day now, hot on the heels of the recent shortlisting at the pre-qualification phase of bidders for the operation of Manchester Metrolink services – a contract currently held by Keolis. In bus, the decision on the first tranche of the Liverpool franchising tender is imminent, whilst the process is in full flow in West Yorkshire, with transport company bid teams juggling resources between this opportunity and the latest round of tenders in Manchester.
Industry awards ceremonies tend to showcase operational deliverers and innovators (once again, I must say, last month’s UK Bus Awards was outstanding and THE best event in public transport). However, there’s a need to give more kudos to commercial folk, those whose performance can be so clinically defined by whether they are in the winning team or if they have won new business through other means. Operations, marketing and customer service folk can play one metric off against another, for instance, customer satisfaction survey scores might be down, but so too are complaints, whilst there’s a whole host of hugely complex reasons why patronage may be suffering. However, for commercial teams, it can be a thankless task, particularly as they make many personal sacrifices during the period of bidding – long trips across the country or overseas to build market intelligence or meet contracting authorities and late nights in the weeks before bid submission. There was a time, when rail re-franchising was in full flow, that the ‘reward’ for a bid director was the prospect of running the company if they won, but those days have gone, and in bus not everyone would necessarily see running a depot in St Helens or The Wirral as a career incentive.
It’s not just the commercial bods at the transport operating companies who need more acknowledgement, but those within the extensive supplier base as well. As someone who has undertaken commercial roles and assignments for transport owning groups and subsidiaries, as well as for large suppliers to these businesses and the companies that I have owned, I’m unsurprisingly in favour of the light being shone on us folk.
In the last two months, a couple of my pals have each set themselves up as lone consultants, having left the security of employment at bus and rail companies. They asked for my advice on whether it was a wise move on their part and how to make a go of it. ‘Rollercoaster’ was my immediate response – your nerves and emotions are on the edge, a favourable lead, a small bit of business won, can create euphoric feelings and great satisfaction, so too if, like me, you are able to eventually sell your business, as I did to an AIM-listed company. But, for all the highs there are many lows – emails that go unanswered when pitching for work, treated with disdain by some employees in a few companies who, in normal circumstances, might be several levels below you in an organisational structure and invoices that take ages to get paid.
My advice to anyone in a sales role in public transport is to have broad shoulders but also recognise that the more you put in, the more you get out of it. The greater the effort you exude to create a big pipeline or to reach out and meet people, improve the quality of your sales prospectus or your bid writing skills, or just the way you present yourself, the greater your chances of success. There’s no room for coasting in the way, frankly, I think you can get away with in a non-sales role in other parts of public transport. Every minute counts.
It’s vital that those in sales reflect on the need for them to be rounded. There are some stuck-up, self-absorbed, transport employees with tickets on themselves, who dismiss salespeople, considering them to be at rock bottom of the food chain. I have seen many a new commercial person experience some kind of inferiority complex because they perceive that they don’t have the power in any relationship and are in a position of subservience. The fact is that us sales folk are more often, than not, the risk takers, the entrepreneurs. Those on the receiving end of our pitches, may well, in this situation, have more power, but they just like us, are trying to create a livelihood. Your role in sales is complex, requiring not just industry knowledge in order to be a credible, engaging and empathetic listener, but more importantly self-awareness and emotional intelligence, a commodity that is utterly alien to many of those who won’t give you the time of day.
Being able, as an ‘industry expert’, to do some of the assignments that you are discussing with prospective buyers is also important, because it helps create greater empathy and not to be unfairly demeaned as ‘just a travelling salesperson’. There’s nothing wrong of course in being a ‘travelling salesperson’ (as I was once referred to), particularly the ‘travelling’ aspect. My advice to my mates and indeed anyone involved in business development, right up to those leading big teams, is that being mobile is imperative. You must be prepared to rack up mileage, spending time and money on lunches and dinners with prospective clients, wherever they may be. Early in my ‘sales’ career, my former business partner said to me ‘no meeting is ever wasted’ and he was spot on. Even the most seemingly pointless meeting with someone you might never think has no mutual benefit, can provide a tiny piece of insight or a connection that might at some stage have legs. Over the years, my wife has often asked why I am travelling to opposite end of the country, staying in some hovel of a hotel just to have a coffee with someone – ‘you’re flogging yourself’, ‘can’t you do it on Teams?’, ‘no one else is doing that’ and I always retort, football manager style, ‘trust the process’.
I’m not saying I’ve cracked it. Last week was more rollercoaster than following Crystal Palace. On Monday, I emailed 30 big businesses offering discounted bus travel for their employees (an easy sale, surely?) and by Tuesday, I’d only received three replies, phoned a non-league football club and offered their season ticket holders cheap travel and then said the bus company wanted to spend several thousand pounds on corporate hospitality, only to be told “our fans don’t like buses and we’re not taking offers of sponsorship or deals” (you couldn’t make it up). Then, after a waffling pitch, a longstanding industry colleague told me he wasn’t parting with £200 for his business and basically, in his view, my latest venture was nothing short of harebrained. For all, these setbacks – and this comes with experience of not letting the defeats set you back – my response to my old colleague was to book a day to wander the streets of his area and utterly prove him wrong and on the other lukewarm responses, I just got straight back into my black book for more mass pipeline development. By Wednesday, two victories were achieved and as I made my long way home from deepest Lancashire to Surrey on Friday, workload, rather than a lack of leads, was the issue. But, like following Palace, you’re only as good as your last win and the spectre of defeat is never far away.
Whilst ‘selling’ isn’t for the faint-hearted and it can be demoralising at times, there are those highs, such as winning an opportunity, however big or small or of strategic value that are exhilarating. However, there are also those moments that aren’t immediately obvious or necessarily of monetary value, and are often only apparent on reflection. They are those dinners or meetings you have where you are on the train home and you realise you’ve not done any sales pitching whatsoever, maybe even turned down an opportunity and just spent most of the time enjoying the company of someone who you consider a mate and just indulging in industry gossip. Indulging in tittle tattle is by the way is important, despite these sanitised times in which we reside. Deep down everyone still enjoys a chinwag about scandals and shenanigans or let off steam about rogues in the industry and, let’s face it, there’s a few out there who are the ‘gift that keep giving’.
The ‘art of selling’ has changed over time. CRM systems have become integral to the landscape for medium to large businesses. I’ve tended to be a bit sceptical of these – I banned their use in a couple of managing director roles I’ve undertaken. I’d seen too many salespeople hesitant about contacting many prospects because they didn’t want to have to be then burdened with the administration of writing up the engagement on a software package. So too, I think sub-consciously if you are too enslaved by a database or spreadsheet, you’re in danger of instinctively treating your prospective customers as a number or mechanising in your mind what should be a deep relationship. I tend to find that those who are so obsessed with being led by their CRM system are the same folk who take a scripted approach to any sales engagement with pre-rehearsed, robotic AI-style phrases. I could never fill in the box on a CRM database after each meeting that could explain the nuances and nonsense of what I’d discussed with one of my sales leads.
Another change to have emerged has been the increasing importance of using LinkedIn as a brand development tool, but at the same time, it’s impact for direct selling and lead generation has diminished. This has been a result of the frequency of automated direct messaging – go through your inbox and I bet its full of requests to sell products that are utterly unsuitable for you or your business. People have now switched off to these. Email contact is, I believe, getting harder – maybe it’s just me, but common courtesy has gone out the window – you can spend an hour or two shaping a personalised email, but you know it will get ignored. There’s a couple of organisations in the transport sector that are harder to get into than Fort Knox for suppliers. They think that the normal rules of decency and politeness don’t apply to them. With each unanswered email, I just get more determined.
Whilst the power of LinkedIn and email may be diminishing, WhatsApp’s fast becoming the definitive tool – easy for everyone to use quickly, capable through voice-note of getting positive emotion across and not relying on unreturned calls or telephone tennis and of course, the joys of double blue-ticks that tell you if your message has been read and if you’re being snubbed!
Last, but not least – in fact, it’s the most important aspect. Business development is about giving and not taking. Whether it’s a big tender or a tiny piece of work you’re going to deliver yourself, providing a great service, surpassing the expectations of the wonderful person or organisation that’s given you the chance, is of unbridled importance. So too, be grateful for those who have commissioned you, make sure you thank them profusely, keep reminding them how appreciative you are and always give back into the relationship, such that meetings with an intention to generate business should ultimately be the last thing on your mind. Be there for them when they want to pour their hearts out about their own fears and frustrations, or if they want to bounce ideas off you or, most importantly, if they fall on hard times in their career and need your help. And don’t forget those who turned their nose up at you and treated you with disdain or just ignored you, when you tried your luck with some sales patter. Like sporting success, career fortunes for all are cyclical and even themselves out over time. Your day will come.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alex Warner has over 30 years’ experience in the transport sector, having held senior roles on a multi-modal basis across the sector. He is co-founder of transport technology business Lost Group and transport consultancy AJW Experience Group (which includes Great Scenic Journeys). He is also chair of West Midlands Grand Rail Collaboration.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
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