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"As a matter of fact, I was too often being friendly to the customers at the expense of the house. It is a common fault in salesmen. They let a thousand trivial
by jusben1369 14y ago
"As a matter of fact, I was too often being friendly to the customers at the expense of the house. It is a common fault in salesmen. They let a thousand trivial demands on the part of the men to whom they sell take their time and energy from the business of the men for whom they sell."
- This is one of the hardest concepts to teach in enterprise sales nearly 100 years later. Too often customers (worse prospects) ask for all sorts of things from compliant sales people who never ask if it's necessary. References, POC's etc. The salesperson chews up hours of their time and other employees times because they don't have the backbone to say "No" or at least "Not yet" The rationalization is "I'm advancing the deal for the company!"
- scrumper 14y agoI picked up on this too. If it resonates, it really resonates. Fortunately, in enterprise sales at least, a good sales engineer can go a long way in curbing a salesman's worst excesses.
- greenyoda 14y agoThe salesperson chews up hours of their time and other employees times because they don't have the backbone to say "No" The salesperson does this because he'll get a nice commission if the sale goes through, and doesn't really care about the people whose time he's wasting.
- vidarh 14y agoIf he' on commission, then either he's not wasting his employers time with these things, if they genuinely lead to high total sales, or he's wasting his own time as well.
- greenyoda 14y agoTotal sales don't determine whether a company lives or dies. It's the bottom line, profit or loss after all the expenses are paid, that matters. Sometimes, the real cost of a sale can exceed the revenues to the company from the sale. For example, I've seen salesmen sell vaporware that the company then has to drop everything to implement, possibly a feature that's not of use to any of the company's other customers. The salesman gets his commission and doesn't care that the development group is tied up with the feature he sold and unable to work on the really important features. If salesmen could receive a commission on profits rather than gross revenues it would give them incentives that are better aligned with the health of the company. Unfortunately, it's easy to calculate a salesman's revenues and very difficult to calculate the actual profits (or losses) attributable to him.
- jusben1369 14y agoWhat you're describing though is a management/leadership problem not a sales problem. Also, with the ongoing emergence of cloud/SaaS based offerings it's much easier to tie real revenue/profitability to comp plans.
- jusben1369 14y agoYou've actually just fallen into the trap that the salesperson is in. If you win the deal then it's a good use of resources (generally) However, you won't win the deal. Just as the main character here, who is also very accommodating, looses out for the promotion.
- InternetUser 14y agoWhat does POC stand for in this case?
- hboon 14y agoProof-of-concept.