I’ve worked with salesmen for years, particularly in one specific industry. I won’t besmirch every salesperson by painting with that broad brush, but I will say that of the ones I’ve known personally, I’d suspect better than 50% of them to have double-digit IQ’s. I was repeatedly flabbergasted by the work product of these clowns- anything handwritten looked it had been created by a slow third-grader- the printing was like a child’s, and a 10-word sentence would have, no lie, probably 4 or 5 misspellings, rampant apostrophe abuse and verb tense problems. That was pretty consistent behavior.
The insult is that these guys lived in nice areas- they were pulling down enough scratch to afford either nice apartments or homes in the more upscale neighborhoods.
I’ve also known some salesmen that are extremely intelligent and well spoken. They’re very successful. However, there isn’t as wide a socio-economic gap between these guys and the nitwits as there would be in any other profession.
My wife’s was in sales for over 20 years, although not the boiler room type portrayed in the movie. One thing she thought was spot on was the emphasis on motivation, usually having something to do with pushing either the fear or grandiosity buttons. I asked my wife about it once after she was required to attend yet another motivational seminar, and she said, “This is the only job I know of where you get rejected for a living.”
By the way, in my opinion 99% (I’m not exaggerating) of the popular motivational techniques in sales are psychobabble crap. When my wife finally changed careers, she felt like she’d been released from a concentration camp.
I quit a sales job because of one of these arrogant, psychotic bastards. A sales manager berated us for being too honest and not using motivational psychology. The part that sent me away was when he bellowed about customer interactions: “Dont’ tell them the truth!!! Tell them what they want to hear!!! Make that sale!!” I walked out after that meeting. Nasty, cut-throat business.
Marge, you know how we say “we want to put the right person in the right house”? Well, the right house is the one that’s for sale. And the right person is “anyone”.
Because the potential income is a lot higher than in most jobs and there’s a lot of autonomy.
To answer the OPs question, there are all kinds of salespeople and all kinds of companies. To succeed in most businesses beyond the staff level, you generally need to actualy be bringing in business for the company. Generally that kind of sales involves developing successful long-term relationships with clients.
The commission based “boiler room” style sales generally found in real estate, financial services and other industries is a different game altogether. Those types of jobs typically hire a large group of candidates, put them on the phones and keep the successful ones. There is tremendous pressure to make your numbers otherwise you simply starve or get fired. They may often have an alpha-male culture of money, alchohol, drugs and women.
They’re probably on the management track, which requires sales experience at the upper levels. I don’t think the salespeople I work with are like that, but then they’re in a highly technical field, and that seems to make a big difference.
There absolutely are the kind of people like Baldwin’s character in the world, I’ve worked for them. But the boiler-room types and the schmoes selling widgets to Wal-Mart are only one kind of salesperson.
Next time you’re in the airport, look at the people working away on their Blackberries and laptops in the gate areas and on the plane - many of them are salespeople. These people have live for the technology - they have home offices often thousands of miles from the company HQ, and the only connection to support staff are via email and phone. They are completely independant and have only their own motivation to keep them going. If they decided to sit on the couch and eat Cheetos all day (or read The Straight Dope!), no one would know for a while.
These people also sell the kind of things that the buyer has to put his job on the line to buy - elaborate software, fleets of trucks, commercial real estate, etc. People aren’t going to spend a million dollars on some CRM software just because you took them to a strip club or gave them some good tickets to a ball game. You really have to know your stuff, be able to convince the buyer you know your stuff, and be able to communicate with people at all levels of the buyers company - from IT to legal to the end user of your product. There are thousands of people who do these jobs and they are typically very intelligent, highly educated, and very nice - they have to be. Put an average phone sales guy in front of a room full of executives and he’ll get eaten up. These guys have very hard jobs and make gobs of money, and they deserve every penny.
I work for a company that creates and sells custom Enterprise level software. Excellent summary, Mundane. You’ve described the process very nicely. I’m not one of the salespeople, but I admire the talent of the good ones. It’s a learned skill, like any other profession.
I’m the IT guy who is actually responsible for implementing and running the software bought by middle and upper management based on the salesdrone’s say-so, and I have serious doubts that the process works as well as you suggest.
A lot of those people with the Blackberries and rollar suitcases in the airport are people like me - some form of ‘consultant’. As you advance in your consulting career, more and more of your work is project management and then eventually sales and business development. At my level, I barely do any actual “work” anymore. Half my time is supposed to be spent developing junior people so they can do the work I once did and the rest of the time spent selling services to our clients (often over dinner and drinks). I need to deal directly with CEOs, partners in law and finance firms as well as kids right out of college.
The “used car salesman” approach doesn’t work with my kind of sales. It’s all about relationship building. If my clients don’t trust me, they aren’t going to give my firm multi-million dollar contracts for projects that their companies future is riding on.
I’ve worked with literally hundreds of sales reps in the mortgage field (wholesale and, briefly, retail) for the last several years and it’s almost eery how accurately this describes 99.9% of them - yes, even the technophobe thing. Even though we rely heavily on computers, fax machines, and blackberries in our line of work.
As a Field Service Technician, there is a component of sales in my job, and as I’ve developed a relationship with some of our regular customers during routine service calls and equipment inspections/certifications, I’ve profitted greatly (professionally and financially) by being straight-up, no-bullshit honest with them.
“Your equipment is fine for your application; upgrades are uneccesary.”
“Sure, there’s 'newer & faster,” but you have several years of effective use out of your current equipment."
And so on. This works very well, as when I tell them that “You need to replace this,” they don’t bat an eye, and cut me a PO practically on the spot.
It drives our service manager and our one full-time sales guy (both low-life, lying, thieving scumbags) batshit that I, a “lowly” technician, can close a customer who won’t even return their calls.
I must admit that I had no idea how the technophobe thing I threw out there would resonate with everyone else. At my office this is a HUUUUGE problem, because not only does it mean that the reps miss out on very important e-mails, but it doubles the work for the people in the office. The reps have handheld machines they are supposed to use for placing orders, but the technophobes end up scrawling them down on pieces of paper, which they fax in, and the Order Desk is forced to enter manually. So not only are we placing direct orders from customers, we are expected to place orders on behalf of the reps. This blatant unnecessary claiming of OUR time as their own makes me want to scream.
I’ve surmised that, due to several of the reasons that Phantom Dennis listed, they just cannot be bothered to learn new technologies. Or much of anything that takes more than a few minutes, really. Severe ADD is another almost universal trait among salesmen.
I have to say, I find it gratifying how many others have similar feelings as I do towards salespeople. I’ve ranted about this sort of thing before, and folks have looked at me like I was the problem.
I’m sure there are lots of people who perform sales work who really are competent and somewhat less evil on average, like those blackberry pounders at the airport described above. The “high end” heavy duty corporate liasons who have actual products to sell and customers who need those products. But I was talking simply about my own experiences, with the salespeople I’ve worked with–mostly advertising sales reps. These people are the dregs, and there are no words to describe how much I despise them.
So if you’re a salesperson and are not incompetent, stupid, and worthless, please don’t think I’m casting aspersions at you. Of course, the ones who are in my sights are too stupid to know that they’re incompetent, stupid, worthless, etc. They all think they shit ice cream.
And no, I don’t call them stupid just because they don’t agree with me. I give them the label because of the number of times I’ve observed them making mistakes, and then making the same mistakes again and again, no matter how many times or how skillfully you try to guide them away from the mistakes. A profound lack of ability to learn is another common characteristic of the bottom feeding sales rep.
I’m just at the point in Norah Vincent’s book Self-Made Man, and she’s describing a very similar scene, including all the “JUICE! JUICE!” screaming you can see at the very beginning of the DVD of Requiem for a Dream.
As a young, unemployed thing, I once attempted to sell condo timeshares. I quit because it was disgusting and deceptive in oh so many ways.
I once knew a sales guy who refused to learn how to use email. He insisted on a secretary printing out all his emails, so he could read them, and then he’d dictate replies into a dictaphone and the secretary would type his “replies” in and send them.
Is it more riveting than the scene linked in the OP? Because I made it just over halfway through that and was bored silly. But I have always been curious about the movie.
Your sales guy and my sales reps must be kin. Most of them have email, but they always ask me to send out proofs to their clients because they can’t be bothered with composing an email and forwarding an attachment. More than once, I’ve sent a proof to a sales rep and received a phone call asking, “I got the proof for so-and-so. Could you please email it to them?” It never even occurs to them to forward the message and attachment.
Around quarter after five today, our fax/copier stopped working. A couple of these idiots spent about a half an hour monkeying around with it, calling various people, asking about this, that and the other thing. Eventually, the inevitable request came: “Could you please take a look at the copier?” I walked over, examined the thing for about 15 seconds (long enough to make sure there wasn’t a paper jam), then just turned it off and turned it back on. Worked fine after that. Why couldn’t the salespeople do that? They couldn’t find the on/off switch. On what is essentially a 3 x 2 x 2 box, they simply couldn’t figure out where the power switch was hiding. (The answer is, “On the side.”)
In Glengarry… the product that the guys are trying to sell is land. I can tell you from personal experience that land sales seem to draw some of the worst ethical dregs in the bunch, if I may paint with a broad brush. Down here in Southwest Florida, I see the results of some of these classic Florida land scams. Thursday, my coworkers and I made an elderly woman cry when we told her that the quarter acre lot she bought for $325,000 was not usable for a business. She told us how the realtor told her how it was possibly viable as commercial and so they bought and paid. We see this a lot. Yeah, the buyer should always check it out before coughing up any cash. But that doesn’t make the predatory tactics of the land sellers any less scummy. There are plenty of ethical realtors and land sellers out there, but we don’t remember them. It’s the ripoffs that stand out. The words, “But the realtor said…” are sometimes used around the office as slang for calling bullshit on someone.
Not including actual criminals, real estate agents are arguably the most dishonest and unethical profession in the world. I’ve never met one who (a) enjoyed any degree of success at it and (b) was not a phenomenally dishonest liar.
Lamar Mundane makes an excellent point that it’s false to say “salespeople” are all thieves. In many business and industries, salespeople are no worse than anyone else. Some salespeople don’t even make commission, or their commission is a small part of their compensation. The salespeople at my business are perfectly decent folks, but it’s not a business where it’s really even possible to rip someone off.
Real estate agents, though… every one I’ve encountered is almost reflexively dishonest, and when dealing with them you pretty much have to assume that no matter what they say, no matter how big or small the issue, if it is to their advantage to lie, they’re lying. Buying our house was an amazing experience; EVERY agent we met was a liar, every single one. They didn’t even lie intelligently; they would lie about things in plain sight.
