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Next time you go to one of those sales schpiels, please please please tape it! I want to see the sales critter’s reactions to your Jerry Springer moment!
I think they need to do more than just the two of them. I think they need 7 or 8 stooges. That way when the couple goes off, the others can say “Hey! They’re Right!” and 1/2 to 2/3rds of the audience walks out.
Boy these are fun stories. I joined a gym about two years ago because I needed to and they had a special going. Everything was fine until my “Personal Workout Assessment” with my very own personal trainer. They were supposed to come up with a routine for you, but after about 30 seconds the giant hulking trainer dropped into a sales pitch that you could clearly tell he had come up with on his own.
Bottom line was he wanted $2k for 8 weeks of instruction. I laughed straight out and said that I didn’t have anywhere NEAR that kind of money. He suggested that lots of people make some sacrifices in their lives to afford his one of a kind sweat oriented services, like some people cancelled their cable. I asked him approximately how much he thought that my cable bill might be (hint: it’s not $1000 a month), and then offered a trade. I’ll teach you some sales and interpersonal skills, and you teach me how to not fall off the Nautilus machine. That was the end of that little conversation……….
But I HATE HATE HATE high-pressure salesmen and nothing they have to offer (and not even participating in your staged incident) could make me put up with that crap. To salesmen I politely say, “No, thank you”, but if they persist beyond that, it’s no holds barred. I’ve become a lot less patient as I’ve gotten older.
I’m not quite to the same point with salesmen that I reached with Jehovah’s Witnesses yet, but I might well make it there before age fifty, at this rate… I think I’ve only lasted this long because I used to BE a salesman…
My friend, Mike, had a terrible experience with a Kirby Vacuum cleaner salesman. It started with a phone call offering free carpet cleaning. This should have been their first clue. But he took the bite and told the guy to come over. Mike actually left in the middle of the spiel to go a baseball game, leaving his hapless wife, Eileen, alone with the vacuum cleaner salesman. (Mike isn’t the brightest bulb in the strand. His excuse is that he didn’t want the guy to leave before getting his promised carpet cleaning.) Anywho, he returns THREE HOURS later and the guy is still there, along with his very angry wife, who was too nice to call the police but not so nice that she signed the contract.
After asking the guy to leave twice, Mike finally resorted to THROWING the vacuum onto their lawn. Then he told the guy if he didn’t leave right then, he’d call the police.
I was looking for a new car at a dealership and the salesman tried to explain to me how a car is an investment because increases in value. You know, like a house. He then told me not to bother doing the math on all the interest I would be charged on a loan because only incompetent people would try to figure that out. I am currently still driving the same piece of crap car I drove in there with and I am perfectly fine with that. I wonder how many people have bought his “only incompetent people do math” salespitch?
I’d like to know how many people bought his “A car is an investment - it increases in value” line. I’ve worked for an auto insurance company. I’ve seen the books and tables that show the value drops for a new car, 1 year after it leaves the lot. It’s not pretty.
I know…I currently work in auto insurance. Also, if that is true why doesnt he pay more for a trade in? Shouldn’t he just give you a new car and take the old car and keep the additional value as profit? He was an asshole.
That’s one of the reasons I wanna keep this thread alive. I mean, I thought I’d heard from some jerks, but none of MINE ever tried to kidnap me or refused to leave my house… This thread is an EDUCATION!
My Dad was in sales and he always taught us “if they say you have to make a decision today or the sale is off, walk away.”
This is totally embedded in my subconscious. I don’t think I’ve even come close to having someone try that line on me though, as I tend to walk at even the smell of high pressure sales. But a friend of mine was looking for a camera and we ended up in a store that used every cheap sales tactic in the book. Just for today, no, just for this hour, she could have the camera at $20 less than the retail price! But if she walked out the door, it was all over. Neither of us had much of a clue whether it was a reliable model of camera or good value for money and the salesman was damned determined we wouldn’t have a chance to go find out.
What stunned me was watching her have trouble just telling him no and walking away. Thanks, Dad. Because I had no problem being darn near outright hostile with mister high-pressure when he wouldn’t let up on her.
[QUOTE=FairyChatMom]
he asked “Did you ever wonder what the inside of a slice of bread looks like?” and I said “Probably a lot like the outside…”
[quote]
I sold a tiny bit of Cutco, and I have no idea what that question is supposed to mean.
The good news is that while the Cutco marketing is a pain, the product is pretty good. You’re paying good money for good stuff, instead of decent money for junk. If you’re into cooking, it’s not totally stupid.
I happened to be talking to a salesman about trailer housing. I said I’d heard that they dropped in value, and he replied that he’d sold one for the same as his purchase price ten years later.
Which conveniently ignores the inflation during the ten years. That’s called depreciation, bud, just not as much as on something that wears flat out, like a car.
Number One: When I was a young married, I let an encyclopedia salesman in the house to present his wares. (This was in the Age Before The Internet). I allowed him to present his spiel thinking I was being nice and doing him a favor. When I told him that I wasn’t interested, he got pissed at me complaining all the while he was packing up his stuff that he just couldn’t believe i allowed him to go through his entire spiel. :rolleyes:
Number Two: About the same time, a Kirby salesman got ahold of my then-husband to razzle and dazzle him about the ability of the Kirby to suck up small animals. When I found out he signed a contract for a million-dollar sweeper, I said we needed to use the 3-day Right of Recision Clause. The saleman demeaned my then-husband when we returned it making snide remarks about who wears the pants in our family… :rolleyes:
Number 3: My girlfriend and I went to S. Carolina for a Fairfield Resort presentation. She went alone because they didn’t require a partner when they scheduled the appointment. Their 90-minute presentation turned into over 3 hours of high pressure sales. Plus, they put us up in a lower-scale hotel on the beach rather than staying at one of their properties. She said “no” in about a hundred different ways until they finally got the picture but we did get an overnight stay at a beach front hotel and meal vouchers for around $50.
I work in Purchasing and get a daily dose of sales spiels. It’s all “Water off a duck’s back” with me, I am very good at saying NO. So, I have taken advantage of many of these time-share entrapments to have mini-vacations. The best was a Fairfield resort that offered 3 days at one of the resorts just for listening to the pitch for 90 minutes. I told the young lady on the phone that I had no intention of buying anything, but she still wanted us to come on down and stay with them. I asked if we could extend our stay, which surprised her. She said that they would love to accomodate us, but it would cost another $32.00 per night. Okay, for $64.00 I would get 5 days, 4 nights at the resort in a suite with a balcony, all the amenities of the resort (pool, gym, hot tub, tennis, etc), in a desirable vacation location, and all I had to do was listen to a 90 minute talk even though they knew up-front that I would never buy into their scheme? The young lady said “Yes” and I booked the vacation.
It became our honeymoon, and a great one at that!
Just say “No”, but enjoy what they give you.
“The greatest thing about these cars is they really hold their value.”
I fell for his horseshit and bought it for $13,000.
Five months later I was made redundant. I went back to the same guy with the value-holding car he’d sold me, in perfect condition - “I need to sell this. How much will you offer me for it, as you told me they hold their value?”
“$9,000”.
Fuck you very much, cuntwad. I gave it to my dad.
(I should have walked out during the test drive, as it was a stick shift, so I put the parking brake on when starting from stationary on a hill, and laughing-boy barked “don’t do that!”)
I don’t like salesmen. sigh again, I reference the part of my life that was pure hell…recruiting. Army recruiting. And I did it from 2001 til 2005. I absolutely hated it for reasons that are too lengthy to go into now. But understand, I had no choice…the army never has enough recruiters so they pick “the best people from certain jobs in the army and train them as recruiters”. My job is really graphic design. (yes, that is a job in the military) But i was forced into recruiting which is a sales job.
The strong arm techniques? Yep, they want you to use 'em. Basically they don’t care what you do as long as you get people to join. I was top recruiter for awhile, but i felt like gutter slime. Around 2004 I was fed up…I wanted out of this crappy job and I was willing to get out of the army to do it. (I didn’t get out, but thats another story.)
But I remember having a conversation with my boss about my decline in recruiting numbers. It went something like this
“What do you mean Joe Blow said he doesn’t want to join! Go make him join! You’re a salesman!”
ME: “No, I’m not, really. I hate this shit.”
“Yeah, well if you worked in the civilian world at a sales job, you’d change your tune! You’d never be able to hold a sales job with that attitude!”
ME: “But if I were a civilian I wouldn’t take a sales job, because I know I’m not a salesman. Thats an unfair and silly analogy. Nothing I do by education and training was for sales so why would I want to have a sales job? Hell, I wish we were civilians so then you could just fire me.”
That pissed him off, no doubt. Fortunately I had already been diagnosed with stress related illnesses, so basically the army wan’t going to make a big deal about me mouthing off to my superiors. Truth be told I didn’t care if they did. But being on that side of the fence I began to hate hard sales even more.