Back in the mid-80’s, just after having filed for bankruptcy (personal and business) I had to basically start all over again.

It was a tough time --- here I was 34 years old with a negative net worth (I owed the IRS three quarters of a million dollars and I had other personal debts of approximately the same amount).

But I had to start somewhere, and so I took a job with a company in Ohio that enabled me to earn huge commissions if I was successful.

And I was successful; in fact, I became that company’s top producing salesperson (out of some 300 reps) within a year.

But I always marveled at the fact that getting deals done (and I should point out that these were very large deals --- a typical sale for me was in the seven figure range) involved two sales; the obvious sale to the customer, and then the internal sale to the company I worked for.

You can understand the external sale, I’m sure. Typically, it took a year or two to close a multi-million-dollar sale. But with commission rates as high as 12%, I was quickly getting to the point where I could pay off both the feds and the bookies.

But what a struggle. You see, this particular software manufacturer (I guess I should point out that the company I worked for sold huge ERP solutions primarily for manufacturing companies) seemingly had no interest whatsoever in doing even one more thing for the customer besides accepting their payment in exchange for a license to use their product.

Oh, we would provide customer service and installation help, of course. But it was always a battle for us sales guys to get even the smallest things done to help not only the sale go through, but also to improve the implementation of the system itself.

(This was over and above the typical “Parasite Abatement Procedures” that we employed just to protect our commissions. You see, whenever a sales guy would close a huge deal, other salespeople who happened at some point in their careers to have merely spoken with this same customer would seemingly come out of the woodwork, demanding their fair commission percentage for “helping to close the deal.”)

So it was incumbent upon us brave salespeople to find various “Happy Mediums” between the needs of the client and the requirements (read: margins, deliverability, service, etc.) of the parent company.

Getting our customers’ interests “covered” was really just part of what a good salesperson can and should do for his or her company.

The other benefit provided to a business by its good salespeople is their ability to “smooth over” the rough spots that normally exist simply due to the culture of the selling business.

Let me give you an example: There is a certain company right here in Pittsburgh. They could be one of hundreds of large and successful businesses. But in any case, their management has an “M.O.” (method of operation) that basically calls for complete indifference to the needs of the customer, post-sale. (Hell, even pre-sale, for that matter.)

In other words, and to these kinds of companies, customers exist to exchange checks for products and it goes no further than that.

Well, this particular company was fortunate in that it employed a handful of salespeople who agreed with the client and thus would go out of their way to ease the client’s transition towards this “different” way of doing things.

The old saying holds true, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” And this analogy fits because these handfuls of heroic salespeople would “smooth over” the detritus normally spread by the parent company by simply going in and listening carefully to what the real problems were and then solving those problems.

I know this because I was once a client of this type of company and the salesperson really was the sole reason why I spent what ultimately amounted to a half-million-dollars with them. He would just not let me be unhappy even though almost every policy and procedure of his company was designed to make me unhappy. And yet everything he did to help me was, at least in some small way, a direct challenge to his employer’s “rules of engagement.”

So when you’re considering putting your sales team together, take a long and hard look at the procedures that you employ internally vis-à-vis your customers. Ask yourself: Do we have these procedures and requirements in place because we need them to profitably close business? Or, do they exist solely because it makes things easier for our company?

Remember, any action or inaction by a business that results in “minimal work” by the selling company itself is doomed to fail. One can only put systems and procedures in place that make life easier for the customer, not the seller.

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