After you’ve been in sales for a while, you get a Spidey-sense for when a deal is going south. Maybe your main point of contact goes dark on you. Or you meet the “economic buyer” (if there really is such a person anymore in this decision-by-absentee-corporate-committee we now live in) and he just doesn’t seem that psyched about your widget. Another common occurrence is that you run afoul of an “office of business suppression”- in Jigsaw’s case the Privacy Police - but other products get caught up in IT security reviews, the legal department, a government oversight committee, the standards board, the procurement maze or any other penalty box type organization whose main focus is too grind commerce to a halt in the name of some bureaucratic ideal or another. Whatever the situation may be, good sales people need to be able to anticipate all possible impediments to their deal and learn to read the subtle signs that they have fallen into one of the many pitfalls along the road to a successful transaction.
Someday I’ll think hard on it and try to enlighten you with some of those beacons. Right now I want to relate a few deals that I have been involved with that blew up in such a blaze of glory that even the most sunny side -up (to the point of delusion) sales manager would yank them off the forecast.
Dot Bomb Car Company goes belly up: In February of 2000 I was selling web analytics as a 5K- a- month subscription to dot com companies. It was like the Lucy the Seal driving around ATT&T Park firing free t-shirts out of a cannon. Fish in a barrel. By June the stock market was in tatters and my company had switched to selling enterprise software (same product of course) for $500K, but it still wasn’t clear how pervasive the failure was going to be. After a few warm up meetings with one of the ecommerce car companies, which had a warehouse full of engineers and web designers during my other visits, I had arranged to introduce the founder of my company to the executive management of FreeAutoForLife.com. Everything was going swimmingly until I excused myself to go to the bathroom. my surprise when I walked out of the executive wing and took a good look at the cube farm. What was once a scene right out of the NYSE trading floor now looked like Home Depot- not a human in sight! Had I checked www.f^ckedcompany.com before the meeting I would have known that they laid off basically everyone in the company. We were meeting with a few whack job early execs clinging to a dream. It was all I could do not clip off my executive in mid sentence in my haste to exit the building.
Sorry, Can’t Speak Right Now: Another time I was trying to sell software to a large East Bay products company and had set up a meeting for my tech guy and me to meet the CIO . I had the technical team basically convinced that our software worked (like that really matters) and now I had to “paint the business vision” for the CIO. Against my better judgment, I let my SE drive the rental car to the meeting. (Although he was legally able to drive, we were late and had to fly to get there, and let’s just say he was from an area of the world better known for their MSG- laden delivery food than for their driving skills.) He was fine on the highway, but when he tried to enter the company parking lot without slowing down we did at least three complete 360s and came to a stop with two wheels jacked up on the front curb of the company. I figured no damage, no injuries (at least none apparent immediately) so let’s get to that meeting- right? Well, we sit down in the CIO’s office and I realize that my heart is beating a hole in my chest and I can’t speak. Words were coming out on top of each other in gibberish like Steve Carell’s character in Bruce Almighty. My tech guy tried to take over but his face is beet red and he’s sweating like a crystal meth addict. Add in the fact that I’m 23 years old, he’s 21, and the CIO is probably 60. We were ushered out after a polite 30 minutes and I never got a another call through to even a temp engineer.
2 Frat Boy Jackasses: I moved to San Francisco when I was 24 years old as the first remote employee from a rapidly growing software firm. Still learning to “juggle corporate life and personal life,” I was a snappy Ivy League guy in a suit by day and booze bag Gen Xer in jeans at night. Anyway, I had been working on getting a technical presentation at Lawrence Livermore Labs (that’s right I named them-I will never be going there again anyway) for 6 months, and finally scheduled the meeting. We flew out our best product manager (also 24) and the meeting was set for a Friday morning at 10.
He arrived just in time to go out Thursday night, which at that time in my life was “mid-weekend.” We hit the town hard and probably wandered back to my apartment at 2AM. The next morning we jumped in the car with just enough time by my soggy calculation (one minute per mile) to reach the Labs. Unfortunately, not only did we arrive in Livermore15 minutes late, but the ensuing security clearance took 30 minutes, so all told 2 whipper snapper guys with gelled hair, shiny suits, bloodshot eyes and brewery breath walked into the conference room one hour late! As the group of no less than 25 engineers re-congregated with their short sleeve dress shirts and pocket protectors, we could have been demoing a product that re-grew hair on live heads in 60 seconds and it wouldn’t have gone over. I chalked it up to my winning personality and most servile performance to date that we weren’t led out at gunpoint.
So there it is. I’m not sure if there is a tip or lesson contained in these three stories, but I have hundreds of them and what better forum to get them published
