MISFORTUNE IN THE 1980s
9121 Mentor 2
Mentor was, as I have said elsewhere, a new subsidiary started by the Provident Financial Group who wanted to expand their offerings. They were somewhat embarrassed by their history, since they supplied credit on the doorstep to poor housewives. At very high interest rates, which had to cover the work of their doorstep agents as well as a high default rate, this business was pretty close to usury; which the government was soon to clamp down on. But they made hundreds of millions out of it -- and Provident accordingly was one of the largest financial institutions in the country.
With its parent having so much free cash, the Mentor organisation itself was well funded; and was in the process of recruiting large numbers of staff. It already had a significant number of programmers, people recruited largely from the teaching profession which was then having a bad time. It also had some of best technical experts, and the technical infrastructure was good. What it wanted was an expert salesforce: and this was where I and the dozen others recruited came into the picture.
They had hired themselves a new marketing director who was somewhat inexperienced, which didn't help. In addition there was a very low existing customer base -- except for a number of insurance companies who were going through the throes of meeting the requirements of the new financial services act (which demanded that their staff be trained trained -- and CBT was just about the only way they do this in the time).
Mentor was based at the Provident head office, in Bradford, and we all converged on this for training. The technical training was well done, and our appreciation of the quite powerful software that they had developed was accordingly sound.
The so-called sales training was a disaster on the other hand. There were a dozen of us, and between us we had senior sales experience amounting to around a century. Yet they used one of the recruits who had experience of sales training consultancy, to try and teach us to improve our effectiveness. Regrettably, this sales training started off with the memorable lines "If you going to take advantage of this sales training you have to forget everything you knew previously". That meant, in effect, 100 years of sales experience was to be thrown away. The sales training itself was the usual cliché ridden sales training -- and I don't believe any of us took any notice of it.
The salesman who delivered this was, unfortunately, a very ambitious one; though his history didn't justify this. I had actually met him before, since we met him at a party in North Waltham -- when he owned a miniature village in High Wycombe, which then effectively went bust. He was, like many such people, a politician. Accordingly his main aim was to devalue those of us -- especially myself – who were in competition with him for the potential job of sales manager. This produced an atmosphere which was less than agreeable. It was even worse where we were cloistered in a pub/bed and breakfast in Howarth. That the rooms were very basic was bad enough, but it meant we couldn't get away from each other. He used this to work on us. Paradoxically it was to become even worse after my book of IBM was launched and got a very good review in the Sunday Times. You might have thought that that would have impressed the others but, led by him, it was used to suggest that I had ideas above my station
Howarth itself is a nice little town. It is of course most notable for being the home of the Bronte sisters. It was, though, rather depressing place -- my bedroom overlooked the churchyard which dominated their Parsonage. I have always felt that their novels were rather dark, and now I could see why that might be.
Our sales territories were to be geographical, which was one reason I had chosen the job - since mine was London and the Southeast. This was a very promising territory. However, after a few months the whole thing was turned upside down and the prospects I had been working on were lost - as we were switched to an industry based approach. As CBT was totally new field, it was not easy to generate business. Rather like IBM it was obviously going to take something like more than a year to build the foundations. However, as I had expected, management still expected us to bring in this business in just a few months. In fact nobody did
Having said that, I made some progress - getting into a number of organisations. Not least of these was BT, which was seriously considering our CBT for use in training the programmers - which would have been a massive market. I also, had a foot in the door of the RAF. However, I did not have time to close any of these. Accordingly, it was a stressful sales situation, which was not helped by having to drive 200 miles up the M1 to Bradford for the regular sales meetings.
Combined with the politicking, which was now going on within the salesforce, this persuaded me to look outside. The net result was that I looked in particular at two situations. The first of these was the Civil Service. The second was the Open University (OU).
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