Bad Salesmen

There’s nothing more saddening than a bad salesman.

No one likes salesman — unless they like what’s being sold. It’s a funny part about life. We’re biased towards what we like, whether we know it consciously or not.

When I go to the store and see an AT&T salesman inside, just waiting for you to walk by, I stomp my ass down an aisle and take the long way around.

I already have a phone plan. I’m not looking to switch everything around just to help you out, Miss Lady.

But when the ice cream man rolls through your neighborhood, you flock to him with your $3 ready to go.

It’s silly to get mad at people for trying to sell you things. We all need things, they just aren’t always the same.

What we can get mad at, however is people that try to sell things to us badly. There are different ways one can do this. I will walk you down two paths here to explain.

“I won’t take no for an answer!”

The strategy of annoying someone until they finally agree is in fact a tactic and it does work sometimes.

Lately, I’ve been helping my boss try to find a good platform that could help track sales as well as offer email marketing. As a writer, I was quick to jump on the opportunity to send the company’s monthly newsletter, so it was important for me to have something that looked good.

The first one was Mailchimp, which offers great design tools. The email looked good and had a decent click rate. I was happy to continue using it.

But Mailchimp is just the email marketing. It doesn’t offer a way to track leads/sales at all so my boss wanted to find the best of both worlds.

We tried Monday, but the emails were bleh. They don’t really offer any design elements; it’s just mass emailing.

So we started looking into Salesforce. Salesforce is a massive company and well known in Indiana, as its tower in downtown Indianapolis is considered the center point of the city. It’s the tallest building we have and sits right on Monument Circle.

As soon as you sign up for Salesforce’s free trial, they almost immediately call you to connect you to a sales person. Which is fine, as they might be able to answer questions and help lead you down the right path.

They schedule you to talk to someone over Zoom, which wasn’t going to work for me. I didn’t really want to do the meeting in the first place being the only customer service rep at my company. I don’t often have time to sit down and talk to some dude for 30 minutes.

We moved it to a phone call and the sales rep gave me their spiel. He asked what we needed it for, how many customers we had, how many people in the company would use it, etc. After 20 minutes or so, he said to give him a call after the trial ended to further discuss what we wanted to do.

I thought this was fine. I had a few weeks to play around with the platform and see if we’d like it.

I didn’t really dive in until about a week later. As soon as I watched a demo video on the website, I get a call from the same lady that originally called me asking if I wanted to talk to a sales person.

“No, I already have spoken to one,” I told her.

A day or two later, the original sales person I talked to emailed me another video to watch. I watched it the next day and within an hour got a call from the sales person. Luckily I was on lunch so I didn’t have to deal with it.

I then saw that he emailed me. He said he’d give me a call back later. I told him to please call the next day instead as I was busy.

He called the next day, and I saw “Salesforce” on the caller ID and let it ring. He instantly called again, then called once more about 10 minutes later.

This was the moment I decided to not go with Salesforce.

The design tools for the mass emailing were slightly better than Monday but not worth the hassle. I didn’t feel like Salesforce earned the sale. Constantly calling is not going to convert me.

I told my boss and he agreed. We’d stick with Mailchimp and figure out a way to track sales through our own Excel file.

The next day, Salesforce continued to call. I blocked the number but one office phone isn’t connected and still rings from blocked numbers. I finally emailed the sales person and told him to leave me the f*ck alone.

You can’t cover the smell of bullsh*t

I was doomscrolling YouTube Shorts the other night and saw this terrible sales pitch from a Dodge dealership.

The lovely man reading through the fees associated with buying the car does this all the time for his friends and others. He goes to the dealership to help point out all the nonsense that dealerships are now sneaking into car sales.

It’s a sad trend that has really sparked up since the crazy market jump in pandemic times. Dealerships felt empowered to upcharge everything because they controlled the waning supply of cars.

This pathetic salesman, without looking his potential customer in the eyes, drops down a comparison between Dodge’s financing and outside financing. Dodge wants you to use their financing, of course, because they get a cut.

He drops the paper down and turns around before slowly sitting in his chair, knowing he just gave them a receipt of absolute horse manure. When you’re giving someone bad news and know it, this is the body language you display.

Once the man starts going through the nonsense fees, the salesman references the dealership’s website, as if that protects them for shoving BS into a sale.

It reminded me of a screen printing company I used to buy shirts from.

The band I tour managed needed a new shirt supplier as the one we used was closing its doors. This new shirt shop was local to the band and could also print posters. It seemed like the perfect company for us.

The very first time I went in there to get shirts, which were supposed to have been done already, the single printer in the building was still printing them. No big deal, I didn’t have anything to do for a while anyway. He explained the printing process to me which I found interesting (and is probably part of the reason I now work for a screen printing company myself).

Each order ended up like this, where he’d tell me shirts were done and I’d go to pick them up and they were “almost done.” A few months into this relationship, we needed him to send us some shirts on the road.

We were out west for a month and needed replenishment in the middle of tour. He told us he’d send shirts to Northern California, then San Diego, then Phoenix, then Salt Lake City. By the time we finally got the shirts, we had just a few shows left on the tour.

One day, I woke up to an email with info from his website, which explained his turnaround times. We were upset and instead of apologizing for not delivering, he used info from his website that meant nothing to me to protect himself. It was a good way to defend himself in court, but not a good way to keep a customer happy.

Every printer lays out turnaround times before taking on an order so the customer knows what to expect. This information doesn’t matter as soon as the printer agrees to take on an order in a specific amount of time. My current company tells customers that we can turnaround orders in 10-14 days, but there are many occasions where we can get them done in a week or less. Once that commitment is made, nothing on your website matters.

I thought it was a pathetic attempt to get out of delivering. To see this Dodge dealer make a similar play to explain why a customer now has to pay thousands of more dollars made me irrationally angry.

Perhaps it’s par for the course that a car dealership is doing some sneaky stuff, but it shouldn’t be. There are great car salesman out there that know how to sell the right way. They maintain positive body language, they can explain fees in a way that makes customers feel OK, and they don’t try to sneak some nonsense into a deal.

One thing a salesperson can’t do is override what their employer wants. Salesforce likely teaches their team to behave this way, and this Dodge dealership is the problem for making salespeople push absolute BS.

But if you’re going to do this bad of a job, you need to find a new company or a new career.