A Tale of Two Salesmen
A Tale of Two Salesmen
In a past life, many years ago, I was working technical support in Silicon Valley for a very powerful, early entry, electronic publishing system. We should all have ended up rich, but alas. And I was associated with sales with my part being the demonstration of the capabilities of the product to prospective buyers. We had a canned demo, but that sometimes changed mid course, especially demonstrating to the truly powerful.
The first salesman I will mention was a real pro. He learned the capabilities of the product and the market for which it was intended. When we did demos, he dealt in a factual universe and let his clients know exactly what they could and could not get and the price if it was something they needed but not currently available. We did extremely well.
The second salesman was a bit less professional, definitely not as ethical, and he was not particularly bright. However, he made up for all these seeming flaws with ignorance of his shortcomings and boundless ambition! During one demo, the client was a very large, very powerful company and this was one of the top players in the company. In the middle of the demo, the client just simply said he was tired of canned crap and instead wanted to challenge me to produce for him on the spot a very complex graphic page. So, I did. And then the trouble began ...
He asked the salesman if this was something his people could do and the salesman said, "Well, of course, you just saw the ease with which it was done." Note right here that it wasn't easy at all, nor was it accomplished in quick order. So he turned to me and said, "Same question. Could my people do that?" And I answered honestly that no, his people could not, for the way that I did it required knowledge of various unofficial and unsupported shortcuts born of deep knowledge of the product.
The client immediately said that he would talk with me from that point forward, since he saw I answered honestly what he already knew from what he saw me do. And we conversed and tried experiments for an extended stretch with the mortified salesman about ready to explode! We didn't get the sale, simply because when the needs of the client were fully laid out, we did not have the production capability.
The salesman was pissed! He tried to take me to task for stepping in and doing that. I reminded him that I didn't step in at all, that he simply disqualified himself with an obvious lie that anyone could see through. He said that he wanted that to never happen again and I said neither did I. To his chagrin, I told him I hoped he had learned his lesson. And that was the last demo he ever had me do for him, so he did learn one lesson, even if not the one I had in mind.
The first salesman was much more successful and much less dangerous. Politicians are pretty much cut from the same cloth. Sometimes the tech support guy is a medical professional and may just give you a straight answer.
As a Marketing Trainee in my mid twenties, I had accompanied a seasoned salesman to an actual user customer who had problems using our product. This salesman tried his best to solve the problem but, could not. I eventually suggested to the customer that he should switch to a more expensive but superior product and booked a trial order. The salesman was livid and refused to accompany me any more and complained to the local manager about how I had let him down. One of the Manager's statements has always stayed with me till today. He said in a different context during the discussions - "Young man, give the customer facts; they don't have to be facts but, give him facts."
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