If you have held a few sales positions, this list will either make you laugh or cry. If you are new to sales, beware of these lies employers tell salespeople.
1. Your commission will be X…until we think that’s too much to pay.
2. Your job and salary is secure….until business gets bad, then we will let you go.
3. We need highly-skilled salespeople like you….until you get too skilled and too expensive.
4. This product needs to be SOLD by skilled salespeople….until we find a way to do it without you on the web.
5. We don’t care how you sell; we are results-driven…now turn in your call report.
Your war stories and comments are always appreciated.
This isn’t really sales, you are just educating the prospect…but we need you to generate incremental revenue
All 5 of the comments above about “lies” told to sales people are true. Sales people understand the nature of business and can deal with those events, however there is one reality that still befuddles me. “We need highly skilled people like you until you get too skilled and expensive. This never made sense to me because the “expense” of a sales person is built into the sale of the goods. What this highlights is the lack of understanding by general management of what a sales person really does. It is cognitive dissonance that the managers of a company fear paying a sales person too much because they sold too much.
A salesman never makes too much. Ownership or management get jealous of the salespersons income.
We want you focused on sales and sales activities…as well as completing reports, filling in online tracking systems and managing product delivery as well.
I had to laugh out loud at this because it’s so true. I was told by one company that I took from a regional company to a national company, increasing revenue over 400% in the process, that I was too expensive. I had a low salary and made most of my pay on commission, which wasn’t that high. Once I established all of the relationships with the national accounts and set them up well, I guess they figured they could pay a less experienced person less money to keep it going. I knew it was going bad when they started to ask for call reports weekly. I knew the owner’s son was a bit jealous because I made more money than he made the whole time he worked there, until his father passed. Then he was able to buy a house in an expensive area. Shortly after, I was found to be too expensive.
So true. Some of the sales functions can be automated as marketing and sales become more integrated but at the end of the day, where complex solutions are being sold, there are parts of the sales process that do require a skilled sales person that can build relationships, trust, customize the solution for the client, negotiate and close the deals and handle the client as the relationship grows. In fact as a sales professional, I am so glad to see many of the mundane tasks automated so we can spend our time closing deals and building relationships!