Sitting in my office way from home. That is a William's coffee pub. Brilliant marketing. Offer the internet for free and sales people gather, and buy things while they work.  Beside me are two guys, one obviously the sales manager, the other obviously the sales rep, who obviously is not hitting his sales target.  Not a pleasant conversation, and not a lot of love being flowing from either side.

I remember when I decided the oil patch was not where I wanted to be.  It was the middle of a recession, 1984 I think. Not a lot of jobs to be had in the tech sector for a guy that worked on oil rigs.  The only job I could find was sales, and I did not want to be a sales guy.  I associated sales with the guy who followed you around the car lot nattering on and on about the shiny car you happened pause by.

Finally out of desperation I held my nose and took a sales job with Microage Computers.  I thought sales support was a better place to be, maybe I could move to a bigger firm once I got some experience.  It was there that I ran into Ed Belitzki.  Ed was a professional sales guy, and I made a comment about his chosen profession that got his back up. He told me "nothing ever happens till someone sells something.  No training, no support, no shipping...nothing."   It was at this point I started to understand the role sales plays in business.  I made up my mind that if I was going to do this, then I would only sell something that made sense.  I got onto the Computer Aided Design bandwagon, and helped a lot of companies out of the dark ages of drafting and design. It felt good. Notes came along, and it made sense too.

Fast forward many years.  I am not sure if it is the times, greed, or what.  I see time and again sales reps calling customers or reseller and resellers because it is the end of the quarter, and they want you to sell something, the customer to buy something.....anything.  We stopped being a software reseller for that very reason. I could not take the constant pestering to push the sale through, to make the number, regardless of the value to the customer.

Lately I have had some of our own partners tell me that they demonstrated a product, and it lacked in many areas in comparison to ours, but the lead came from ABC and they felt they had to pitch that product to make their numbers and keep people happy so they would feed them more leads.   Man...how can you do that?  How do you face your customer?  How can you stand yourself.  You should be ashamed.   Sales needs to be more than that.  You are lucky Ed is not around.  

Sigh...my rant for today.