| I really don't know what else to say. But that probably won't stop
me from typing, anyway.
It sounds like you are one of the really good sales people who believe
in the RIGHT way to sell. I can appreciate your disgust at the
comments to which you referenced in .0. It sounds like they just
added insult to the injury that you are going through in your job.
Sales LOOKS easy to people that don't see it up close. I love to
work hard and usually do but I couldn't take the kind of punishment
that sales requires. It takes a special type of person to be a
PROFESSIONAL sales person.
The problem is that most of us have a stereotypical view of
NONprofessional sales people. We tend to view sales people as ripoff
artists or that ilk. It's like management - what DO those people
DO all day to get the big bucks? It's FAR harder than it appears
and I believe that most of the negative comments come from being
unaware of the REAL job.
Being a sales person for Digital can be VERY difficult. You must
be a business partner with your customer, know how our products
fit with their needs, and convince Digital to help the customer.
Back in the good old days, we used to walk away from bad business
but that concept seems to have disappeared. We SEEM to be saying
that we want EVERY piece of business we can book regardless of the
fit between the customers' needs and our solutions and/or tools.
This makes it even tougher on sales people.
We desperately need the good business partner type of sales people
to be sure that our customers get the solutions they deserve. Paying
commissions (whatever you want to CALL them) is going to cause more
and more of the sell them and leave them type of sales person.
I hope that you'll be able to hang on and help steer this massive
ship called Digital back onto a more reasonable course relative
to the way we sell.
Keep the faith,
Don
|
| re: .0,
I appologize for the somewhat callous remark I made back in June.
If you read the entire note, you will see that the remark wasn't really
aimed at the hard-working sales force, but instead was an expression
of my own frustration towards the death of the Sales Training IVIS program
combined with my excitement with this newly discovered Vaxnotes medium.
You have to understand that I loved producing those Sales Training
courses and was extremely proud of them. Then when nobody bothered to use
them in the Sales Force, I took it rather personally. Later it became
apparent that there was much more to the picture than simply scant IVIS
usage among the salesforce, but also had alot to do with the IVIS migration
away from the Pro-350 in general (which ended-up affecting alot of people).
Despite my seeming lack of compassion, I was once a salesperson myself.
My background in Sales comes from the comparative low-end of the spectrum.
I began selling newspapers as a kid, and later spent part of a summer
selling cookware door-to-door (both of which were almost pure comissioned
sales and both of which I won sales contests doing them). I have also had
many retail jobs in my life, but mostly hourly-wage. Of all the retail
jobs I ever had, the only one which I actually consider as being "sales"
was my job at Radio Shack because of the fact that it paid minimum-wage
OR (5%) commission (whichever was the higher of the two). Believe me, I
didn't stick around there for minimum wage, but instead was setting
district records selling well into the "(5%) commission" range.
I happen to believe in this sort of commissioned sales as being a
good form of incentive to force a salesperson to really sell their product
line, yet I agree that it has some major drawbacks for the long-term future
of a company that relies on such high-pressure sales. Take IBM for example,
they have traditionally relied on their highly-sophisticated marketing
and sales techniques to make them the most highly-visible and consequently
most wide-spread computer vendor in the world. The problem is however,
the quality of IBM products has not been able to keep up with their
marketing hype and sales promises, resulting in somewhat bam-boozled
customers leaving for other vendors.
DEC, on the other hand, hardly ever advertises, and until recently,
offered their salespeople relatively little in terms of a commission. This
modest approach is fine if you are limiting your sales to an elite community
of engineers, but things have changed and now DEC is targeting a much larger
share of the traditional data-center market, as well as the many other
computer markets. The fact is, it's a cruel world out there, and in order
to face up to that world, you need to be able to either play along (which
means offering commissions), or you need to introduce new rules into the
game which allow you to beat the competition in a fair fight.
The fact that I griped about "overpaid and stylishly-underworked
middlemen" was more of a description of the problems inherent in the
"real-world" of the sales profession, and (as you and I both fear) is
more of a prediction of what may be in store for us if we follow in the
footsteps of commissioned salesforces (IBM for example), than an actual
description of the pre-existing DEC salesforce.
My idea was to take advantage of this fabulous noting facility and
make a world-accessed DECUS notesfile available to assist our customers
in making their decisions (just as the many internal notesfiles assist
our salesforce in determining their sales strategies). I figure that if
we let them get there hands on a real network, that they'll be instantly
hooked and will buy lots of VAXes as well as networks to hook them together!
That's what I meant by real $ales!
Anyway, to make a long story even longer, I no longer work in Sales
Training, but have gone onto a career as a Software Engineer in HPS which
I thoroughly enjoy, and I wish you all the success and happiness in your
career as well! :-)
-davo
p.s. I hope you manage to fight-off the grave for a good long while!
|
| You're thinking of the "Decision Point" course which was developed
in Bedford. This course was a major production involving literally
hundreds of people and was quite successful because of it's generic
non-proprietary quality (it made for a good demo of IVIS capability to
customers interested in purchasing IVIS systems as well).
My group (John Smith and Dan Cooper were there) coordinated the Hong
Kong DECathalon event, but we did not actually produce that particular
IVIS program. The courses we produced generally contained more proprietary
information geared secifically to the training of the DEC salesforce, and
as a result, these courses were not typically seen outside of the training
environment.
The IVIS courses which were produced by the Sales Training IVIS group
are listed here:
1. Personal Computing: Defining Customer Needs
2. Casestudy: Sloane/Wentworth Sale
3. The Digital Difference
4. Face To Face (finished, but never released)
The last three work both as touch-screen or regular. I could go into
great detail about how each of these work (being the programmer), as well
as the learning objectives, etc., but I doubt if such a disscussion would
really be appropriate for this conference. Contact me by mail for more
information,
-davo
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