MISFORTUNE IN THE 1980s
0290 ComputerLand -- Systems Support
In addition to the sales team, at CompterLand I took onboard a systems support team which was very large for a PC dealer. We had an engineer and two software support people.
These were, with one exception, much more productive and stable personalities than the sales people. The exception was the assistant on software, who our tame professional salesman, Geoff, brought with him as his protégé. This assistant, let's call him Max, was a total disaster. He was an unstable personality whose behaviour was totally unpredictable. Not least you could never work out what he would be doing with his work. He insisted on having a Cavalier sports model for his car and then thrashed it with 1,000 miles a week, going down to Cornwall every weekend. What was worse, he did stupid things, like putting obscene jokes in the customers' software. After a while, despite Geoff's protestations, I simply had to fire him. I found myself telling him to pack up and get out; and then desperately running out to the car park when it was obvious he was going to take our car with him!
Some of the others were reasonable, the replacement assistant I brought in, a guy called Pankesh, really was wonderful. He was so committed the organisation that he actually cried when I left it.
The problem but was not of their making, but with the sales personnel not bringing in the necessary level of sales there was too little for them to do. Ultimately one had to go, and I chose the manager, since he had been quite ineffectual and the others had done all the work. It’s tough when you have to get rid of people, but the economics sometimes makes that necessary.
Our sales campaigns were predicated on running seminars to introduce customers to us and our products. This was very much in line with what I had offered in Biomedical. In this we were quite successful, since we managed to get significant numbers of people along to seminars. The problem was, of course, the sales force; who were totally incapable of closing these prospects after the seminars. We attracted people to seminars in the first instance by a significant mailing campaign. There were two problems with this. The first was that the list that we used from the leading list provider was poor in the extreme. Second was that our backup, which inserts in an area edition of the leading computer magazine, failed because the magazine managed to send all the inserts to the other side of London. They magnanimously gave us our money back for their own charges, but nothing for all those wasted leaflets that we printed at a cost of thousands of pounds. The real disaster though was that we had no prospects coming from those inserts.
Unfortunately Ian compounded in matters by holding back the showroom, even after our the building was opened by the local mayor, since he wanted to put in a brightly mirrored plaster ceiling to it. This took specialist skills which were not available for a couple of months. During those months the sales force sat on their hands. They shouldn't have done so, of course, but it was the ideal excuse; in that they had nowhere to demonstrate. In this way we started with two months of expenses around our necks. Having said that, the seminars themselves went well and we did actually makes sales.
The most fascinating of the seminars was the one to be run by Geoff. He was a specialist in selling accounting software and really did know his way around some of the packages. Accordingly we had set up a seminar with demonstrations and overhead acetates to illustrate these. He was to do these presentations. It was only a matter of hours before the first of these was to run that we have found he had the most incredible stage fright ever. He simply couldn't stand in the front and deliver. I had to urgently find a solution. Accordingly, I did the presentations at the front and Geoff sat at the back and operated the equipment and the software. I managed to explain this away on the basis that he was our software expert and needed to be on the keyboard. I got away with this, and the seminars went quite well -- but I was walking on water. I needn't have bothered since the whole thing died when the others simply couldn't push these prospects through to buying the equipment!
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