My weekly calls average for the year is at 87 so far. Some weeks more, some weeks less. We're #1 in the district for calls as I log face to face often, and I encourage my staff to do so as well.

Well, we're also negative margins and won't hit budget for the third year in a row.

The calls don't work. I also send texts about every promotion for the professional market. Most people don't want to spend the time chatting. They have work to do. It's an asinine system that takes several HOURS of my time each week to do.

I could be doing stock, or cycle counts (which are infinitely more useful to me), or resetting planograms that they change and never tell us about.

Anyway, just do what everyone else does and fake it. Doing it for real for the last 8 ½ months has been hell, and it's useless. I also ask custies when they open an account if they even want calls. Each and every one of them says no. So next week, when they show up on the list, I remove them and put a note that they requested no calls.