25/08/2018
Today I read: Bad Sales
“In an incident that I remember from the mid-90s, when companies were leveraging ERPs to transform their operations, the sales team of one such global software product company sold licences to a large manufacturing company with the promise of product features that were not planned yet, or were several versions away.
The sale having been made, the sales team collected its bonuses, while the implementation and customer support teams bore the brunt of customer dissatisfaction.
Sometime sales team puts you in lots of trouble.
In another case, the management of a large outsourcing company pushed sales to close large deals in a hurry since the stock market measured their success by the size of the deals closed during the quarter. That done, the sales team made its commissions, but in the long run the company had to employ several lawyers to fend off issues emerging from such deals.
To recollect a recent case, the sales teams of various competing companies (almost all of them Fortune 500 companies), had camped in the reception of an infrastructure start-up for several months, in the hope of a deal in their favour. Sales efforts continued without assessing the business case of the start-up, including its ability and propensity to buy. The sale never happened and the start-up wound up without initiating operations since its business case was never viable.