Sales Weasels

As an engineer in a manufacturing plant, I buy all sorts of things. In many ways if you break my job down to the root, my job is to spend money. In the course of ordering large dollars of equipment, I have to deal with sales weasels. No offence intended to anyone who is in sales, as most sales people understand how to go about their jobs properly, unlike the sales weasels I speak of. To clarify, this is not a retail situation, but business on the level of contractors, factory representatives, and industrial distributors.

Some sales weasels don't seem to understand (or don't care) about some basic rules of the situation. Let me give you some of those:

Rule 1 - I am busy. This means that when I need something from you, I will call you. If I am not calling you, I don't need anything from you, therefore don't talk to me.

Rule 2 - I usually tell people exactly what is stated in rule 1.

Rule 3 - If you ignore what I tell you, I will get annoyed and no matter how good your widgets (or widget making machines) are, I will not buy it from you.

Rule 4 - We both need to make money - I understand that. If you try to screw me over, you are dead to me.

Rule 5 - Even though you have worked very hard to get my business, if you don't get it, I don't want to hear your whining about it.

Rule 6 - Don't cold call me......period. If you do, I will not speak with you.

Rule 6 is what prompts me to write this post. About 35 minutes ago, my phone rang, and the call display said "Lobby." We have a phone in our lobby, but it's just inside the building, and you either need a swipe card or you must he buzzed through in order to enter the plant. Whenever I see "lobby" come up on my phone, and I am not expecting someone, I never pick it up. If the person leaves a voice mail, I will check it, and if you are not too annoying in general I will call you to tell you I don't need to see you now, and remind you of Rule 1. If you choose to not leave me a voice mail, then I assume you have left, or you don't really want me to know who you are.

The latter is what happened today. No message was left, and about 7 minutes later, the phone rang again, and the display said "Lobby."

Rule 7 - Despite your repeated attempts, I will never violate Rule 6.

Once again, no message left.

At this point I check out my office window and see what cars are in the visitor parking area. I don't see any I recognize.

A few minutes later, the phone rings again......you guessed it "Lobby" was on the display......

Rule 8 - If you think I am stupid enough to fall for your tricks, then I will likely never do business with you.

Since this person displayed unusual persistence, I sent a spy to the front lobby to see who it was - if you walk to the evil hellhole known as the accounting department, you walk right by the lobby and can see who it is through the window. The spy returned with good information - we now know who this person is, and sure enough, I have no reason to see him. Now this is getting fun.

I wait patiently, and several minutes later, the phone rings again. Once again, it says "Lobby" and once again, I let it go to voice mail, and no message is left. I will certainly give this guy points for trying. A few minutes later, I see him skulk out to his car, get in, and drive off.

I win!

Now here is the part I don't understand.....why not call me before you get here to see if I have time rather than wasting yours standing in our lobby? Also, why not leave a message, because if I actually wasn't available, I would now have no idea who you were or that you were here. Aside from my rules, this seems like a wasted call on the part of the salesman. I guess I just don't get it, unless he has to make a certain number of these calls every week or something. Not a very effective sales plan in my view......

And just so you know, not all sales people are dumb as a post, as this guy is. I have had some people call me from the lobby, and then when I don't answer they pull out their cell and call me on that. I only was caught with that one once.......I certainly gave the guy credit for being creative, but he didn't get any business in the end.

Another tactic is the rotating number plan. Keep dialing everyone in engineering until someone picks up, and then get them to transfer you to the person you really want to talk to. I usually listen for the other phones to start ringing when I don't pick mine up - we have signals we give each other to avoid this one being successful.

I long for the good old days, when we actually had something known as a receptionist who could screen out the wheat from the chaff........

Its a slow day on the board so I thought I would share my little story. Thanks for reading.