After that, I spent the first two weeks in May in Seattle going thru Version 1.0 of Cobalt's field sales/service training.  It was quite evident that it was the first iteration of their formal training, and while it was valuable, it probably could have been cut down to one week.  While there over the weekend in between the two weeks of training, I took a trip with three other new-hires to Mt. St. Helens.  That was quite an experience for me, and I remember that trip pretty vividly nine years later as I write this.  After the two weeks in Seattle, I would spend another 10 days (including yet another weekend) on the road with the guy whose territory I was taking over.  It was an interesting 10 days, as the goal was for me to pick up some things from my predecessor, but half-way through the trip, he was commenting on how much he was learning from me.  I guess those two years as a customer really provided some perspective that he had not seen before.  

After spending most of May in Seattle and on the road, the territory was finally all mine.  I was given the first 90 days or so to manage the territory from Birmingham with the expectation that I would move to Tennessee after that, assuming I still wanted to work for Cobalt.  I was hired as a service consultant, but was allowed to make sales, as well, since Cobalt had not yet found a sales consultant for Tennessee.  It wouldn't take long before I had a pretty long list of dealers that wanted to talk to me about getting a website.  I was loving it.  No cold calls, and the dealers are just lining up to have the conversation.  Because of this, I was able to make an immediate impact in sales, and this was quite exciting.  It didn't really make me want to be in sales long-term, but it was going to be fun while it lasted.  After a month or so in the territory, I closed a deal that included six dealerships, and another eight deals or so would also come in around that.  My sales for the month would triple quota, and I would finish the month in the top 3 (of 50ish).  A couple weeks before all of this happened, it was announced that we had landed a huge endorsement from Chrysler, and with that, those of us that had been hired to be service consultants would become service consultants for Chrysler only, so my territory would not be Tennessee anymore, it would be the Memphis zone for Chrysler, which included parts of Mississippi and Arkansas, from what I recall.  However, when my numbers were posted after the 14 deals (give or take) all closed, the regional manager of the sales team decided he wanted to lure me to sales permanently.  Had it not been for the mammoth month in sales, I would have not even considered the sales position, but when they showed me both compensation plans and I calculated the commissions based on each comp plan, I could not swallow the idea of saying "no" to the sales position (the commission was triple on the sales plan).  And with my acceptance as the sales consultant for Tennessee, I moved into my 2nd position at Cobalt less than 90 days into my employment.