MISFORTUNE IN THE 1980s
0269 ComputerLand Salesmen
The key resource of any PC dealer is its sales force. Thus, in order to make our very optimistic sales targets, we had to recruit something like ten or a dozen salesperson. We were nothing if not ambitious. The problem was that there was a scarcity, indeed a complete famine, of reasonable salespeople.
Accordingly I found myself interviewing significant numbers of candidates. This was not helped by the fact that I had to do this sitting on the floor of my office, since our furniture had not yet arrived. Luckily this was seen as something of a gimmick by the candidates; and turned into a benefit rather than a problem.
We first of all needed a good sales manager, to run the sales team. At that time First Computers had just gone bust, so we immediately recruited their sales manager -- who we thought was, by the standards which held in the market, quite good. So, for a month or so he helped us recruit the new salesman. I must admit he was much more aware than me of how low the standards were, and I too rapidly dropped the standards I applied. He also was aware of our own shortcomings, and accordingly after the month found himself a better job! His legacy was persuading us to take his sidekick at First Computers as our new sales manager. Whether that was an intended sabotage, where he was going to competitor, or whether he just didn't know the guy, I don't know. In practice his place-man turned out to be something of a disaster.
None of the salespeople who came through would have been ones that I would have picked. Perhaps we should have stopped at that stage, but the launch of our new ComputerLand carried its own imperative. We were bleeding money at something like £10,000 a week; and we couldn't afford not to open.
Accordingly we got ourselves very mixed bag of salespeople.
We lost the first of these within a couple of months. He was found to be an alcoholic. We had our suspicions when on most days he came in with his breath smelling of drink, most days that was when he came -- he was very irregular. We had even greater suspicions when he managed to crash his car, albeit with minor damage, twice. Eventually, though, our suspicions were confirmed and he had to go.
We took on board two totally new salespeople; ultimately we called them the terrible twins. They had no experience whatsoever, but a considerable degree of arrogance -- which got them through our interviews. In reality they turned out to be awful salesmen. In particular, one of the kept coming back and explaining at great length why it was impossible to make the sale he was involved in. It always came down to the fact that the price was too high. Eventually I decided to put him to the test, so when he came in and said that the prospect wanted a discount I gradually reduced the price. Each day he came back to say the prospect wanted a greater discount. Ultimately, believe it or not, I said that we would give the prospect a computer for free. At this he trotted off, only to come back to demand additional software - also of course for free, since his prospect was unhappy that it was only the PC that was free! At that point he, and his terrible twin, were fired.
The whole culture was, though, defeatist. Even when someone came in with a major sale -- it would have been the signal for joyous celebrations in a normal sales office -- he actually had to apologise to everyone else. They weren't supposed to make sales, and they had broken this rule!
I tried to teach the sales force how to sell their equipment, on the basis of the knowledge of equipment itself and in particular knowledge of the customer's business. However, the ingrained culture was such that a salesman should be able to sell anything to anyone. Knowledge of the products or of the application was cheating. So, almost deliberately, they refused to learn anything.
The salesman they looked to, to provide leadership, was called Jeff. He had been around for a long time in the industry. He was, indeed, a convincing figure of a salesman. Not only that but in the first half of his sales campaigns he greatly impressed the prospects. He used to come back in, I'm sure correctly, and explain how well his selling campaign was going. But it always fell apart in the second half. Geoff never actually sold anything worthwhile. It took me a long time to realise why this was. I found that when he first went in to the prospect he falsified the evidence. Indeed, he lied. In particular, he set the price much higher than really was the case, so that he could later offer a discount. He did lots of things like this, and he persuaded everyone else that these lies were essential to sales campaigns. The problem was that when the prospects found the lies out, as they inevitably did, they totally lost trust in him and he effectively was out on his ear. I tried to get him to change, but he'd been too long in the game for that to happen.
The classic situation came one day when the receptionist told me that a prospect was looking at the computers and no one wanted to handle him. Even though there were salespeople in the sales office they wouldn't go out and talk to him. Accordingly I went down to help him. Perhaps the sales office were wrong, but they had every right to be apprehensive, since he was from a company that made its own PCs. He was a very unlikely prospect. However, I thought it would be useful to get my hand in again, so I took him under my wing.
Over the next two weeks I conducted what was one of my toughest sales campaigns. Not merely was he from an organisation which made its own PCs, and as such he was one of our competitors, but for the past year he had been running a trial of equipment from another competitor. This trial had just two weeks to go to the decision. Accordingly, I had somehow or other to negate that trial in order to sell our own of equipment. I used all the techniques I'd learned in IBM, especially that of really understanding the prospect’s business, and I finally managed to make the sale against all the odds.
You might have thought that the sales team would accept that this showed that my ideas of selling techniques were reasonable. None of that, they decided that I had given the equipment away. In fact I had given a discount at the end, but only 15% - which was very low by the standards of the industry at the time. The main reason I had won had been my skill in making sales in the marketplace. Even so, they refused to accept the discount was only 15%, even when my accounts clerk showed them the books which demonstrated that this really was the figure. So strong was that culture that they still wouldn't believe the figures.
Thus was our ultimate business demise predicated on such poor salespeople.
We eventually did get in one reasonable salesperson, who worked with Ian selling CAD (Computer-Aided Design), which we were to specialise in. He came complete with pink rimmed classes. He was something of a character, but he did manage to move equipment. On the other hand, by then I had accepted we had to shift equipment on quite significant discounts; but this was only able to put off the evil day for a few weeks.
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