Episode #170: Selling Beyond The Sale

The main goal is always to get the sale agreed. To get the buyer to say “yes” and specify when delivery will take place. All of the efforts are concentrated here but is that enough? Over promising by salespeople is legendary. They do this to get the sale over the line. The potential damage to the brand is not in their minds because that is not their department. “Production, Logistics, Marketing and Customer Care need to take care of that stuff, my job is just get the deal done”. This thinking is a pact with the devil in sales and leads to a lot of heartaches down the road.

The supreme focus on the sale is a big mistake. As I always keep harping on, it isn’t the sale we should be focused on - it should be the next sale, the reorder, the next assignment. The current sales discussion we are having with the buyer needs to be mindful of the value we have claimed being substantiated by what we deliver. That means we don’t blow up the supply elements of the company to make them do the impossible, in ridiculous timeframes, because that is when problems will arise around quality. We do what we can to make the client happy but we don’t drag our brand through the blood and the mud to do one deal.

Reputation in the market is everything. A client pressured me to cut some corners on our quality to satisfy some costs calculations. I told the client that If we do it this way there will be pushback and unhappiness. He wasn’t phased in the least and wanted it go ahead anyway. I was mesmerised by the opportunity of a new sale and a new client and went along. What I didn’t think about at the time was that for him there was no risk. I was carrying all the risk because this was my brand and not his in the firing line.

It was a mess as I predicted, but again he wasn’t phased. I wasn’t happy because by now it had dawned on me that my brand had just taken a hammering. At my cost and my insistence, we re-did the training for his senior people. I thought I had recovered the situation. Go forward five years later when one of my staff visits that same company, who by this stage is four presidents and HR directors down the succession line. Does he hear the whole scrambled original poor plan was their idea, that we went back in at our cost and fixed it? No, instead the corporate memory over there is we were sub-standard in our delivery. Ouch!

I didn’t see beyond the sale by thinking about the high cost of short money. I just went with the President’s wishes, when I should have just said “no” and walked away if he didn’t like it. We are still hear paying the price and he isn't even in Japan or with that company anymore.

I learnt my lesson. A start-up founder had me meet the whole senior team and him finally. They are very successful and doing well, but they have grown so fast they have outstripped their leadership capability and are losing good people as a result. I had what they needed. However when I met the President, I realised this guy doesn't care about people. He told me he was really focused on HR issues and building a team. As I spoke with him I realised his rhetoric and his real thinking didn’t match up though. To him they were just interchangeable parts in his machine and he can just switch them in and out as he needs to.

On purpose, I let that business just slide off the table, because I knew the fish rots from the head and no matter what we did, it would have zero impact. Being blamed for having zero impact is not a brand builder and I walked away from the precipice. I don’t know what happened after that, but I do know whoever took on that work will have faced a train wreck and they will have been the first casualty. I could see there was no possibility to sell beyond the sale and we were better to leave that time bomb well alone.