Making a great cup of tea has nothing to do with making a sales call, does it?
Drinking a great cup of tea has a lot to do with the daily enjoyment of life and like many things worth doing, it requires an appropriate set of tools, a process and it takes time to achieve the desired result. So does making a great sales call - doesn't it?
Tea-bags are quick and easy short-cut, but typically they contain very finely chopped tea.
A cup of tea made from the low-cost tea-bags you find in most supermarkets often contains tea so fine, it's almost like dust. This is designed to impart color and flavor in under a minute.
But this type of black tea, often delivers too much tannin which produces a bitter flavor... and even the best tea-bags fall short of a properly brewed cup of quality loose-leaf tea. This is one of the reasons that tea is often served with milk and sugar - to mask the bitter flavors.
Isn't that a bit like a bad sales call?
It's easy to pick up the phone and dial the number but without taking the time to understand anything about the buyer, their likely issues, their digital profile or the changes in their industry or their competition, the buyer on the other end of the call is likely to have a less than satisfactory experience if they answer the phone.
Tea, Camellia Sinensis is the second most consumed beverage Worldwide, after water. Tea consumption per capita in Britain is 10 times that of US tea consumption, yet USA coffee drinkers only drink 50% more coffee per capita than the Brits. (Source Wikipedia).
A surprising fact: by weight, tea actually contains more caffeine than coffee, but the amount of tea required to produce a drink is far less than coffee.
Most tea in the USA is consumed cold, in the form of iced-tea drinks.
Before I share with you the method of making a fine cup of tea, you may be asking, why bother?
If you haven't had a great cup of tea in your life, then you are missing something special. In Asia, tea making and serving is a ceremonial event.
In Britain and its former colonies it is often a cultured event and takes the form of afternoon tea or tea parties. If you ever visit Turkey or Persia, the first thing you will be served on making a new acquaintance or renewing a friendship is a cup of tea.
Most people I have met in the US have never had a great cup of tea because they have either used heavily chorinated water, or water that is not boiling, poor quality tea in bags, used a heavy, thick mug that extracts much of the heat from the water or have not left the tea to steep for sufficient time to extract the flavor, or a combination of all of these errors.
The Method
My next article will expand on what it takes to make a great sales call.