The Super Salesman

The Super Salesman

by Dave Barth
April 27, 2008

This is a fictional story based loosely on factual events.

Garth was hired by a super-salesman, Dick, to do accounting and other, non-sales related activities at the Dick's company. The company provided marketing assistance to small franchise stores that sold widgets. When he hired Garth, Dick explained that there were approximately 2842 widget stores in the U.S., and his objective was to sell prospect leads to a great many of them.

Dick had gotten into this business by a fluke. His lead telemarketer saw a widget truck one day and suggested that widget stores might benefit from Dick's marketing company. The telemarketer was really the person behind the start of Dick's enterprise.

Nearly all of the widget stores were "mom and pop" operations that were usually undercapitalized, operating on a shoestring, and often running in the red. When Dick explained to Garth that these stores sold to businesses and individuals in their immediate area, and that they delivered widgets to these customers, Garth realized that each client store would reach saturation in less than a year. He also understood that Dick wasn't interested in hearing negative input from him or his other employees. Dick was determined to make his marketing company succeed, at all cost.

Widget store saturation could occur in two ways. First, Dick's company could run out of prospective businesses to contact within the store's delivery area. When Dick's telemarketers had contacted each prospect in the widget store's area of operation, and been rebuffed three times, it was obvious that the potential for getting those prospects to use the widget store's services was nil. At that point, there would be no more prospects to contact within the radius of delivery. Widget stores were loath to increase their delivery radius due to rising fuel prices and the fact that increased delivery times would reduce the store's effectiveness in other ways, such as creating new widgets and servicing other customers.

The second way saturation could occur was that if there were sufficient prospects within the radius of operation for a widget store, when the prospects that became actual clients of the widget store reached a certain number, the widget store would not be able to service any more customers and would stop paying for additional leads from Dick's marketing company.

Another problem with the stores, already alluded to, was that they were cash poor, barely able to survive financially, and they often dropped out of Dick's marketing program simply because they were unable to pay for it.

There was always an end-point for Dick's company relationship with every widget store client, and in most cases, it would be reached within three to six months. The bright spot in this situation was that Dick's telemarketing staff was incredibly intelligent and efficient. The result of his operating model was that Dick had to continually sign up new widget stores to keep his company viable and able to meet payroll.

Garth's job was to tie up all of the loose ends left by Dick, and there were a lot of them. Dick was a great salesman, and some said he was a genius, but he had a few unusual idiosyncrasies. He hated notes. One of his first admonishments to Garth was, "Didn't I tell you never to leave me a note? I don't want you to place any paper on my desk!" This was a foreign concept to Garth, who was used to communicating to absent bosses and coworkers by placing a note on their desk. Future admonishments were usually in the construct of a question, which Garth assumed was some sort of sales technique that Dick used when he was selling.

Admonishments were always given out in a loud, authoritative voice that everybody in the office could hear. Garth assumed this was Dick's way of enforcing his authority over everybody. Dick never made a suggestion in a quiet, unassuming voice. It was always made in a loud commanding way which grated on quiet-spoken Garth. Garth believed that Dick saw his quiet, efficient manner as a weakness and that Garth could be berated with impunity to believe that he was inferior to Dick in every way.

Garth recognized this management type as being the Theory X method whereby a boss prefers to utilize the whip instead of the carrot to motivate his employees. This hard-assed, negative approach works with some uneducated, blue-collar workers, but Dick's smart, highly educated employees saw through it like it was a glass window. Instead of garnering respect for Dick by his employees, this approach garnered fear and loathing. This method does have its uses in prisons, in the military, and in slave camps, but not in most businesses.

Another of Dick's heavy-handed admonishments was, "Didn't I tell you not to send me any emails?" This was another attitude that Garth had never heard uttered by a boss. So, because Dick was unwilling to receive notes or emails, the only means of communication left was his cell phone.

Dick had taken some crash courses in how to operate a computer, but he didn't know how to use Windows Explorer that allows the user to see and open any file type. If he wanted to open an Access file, he opened Access, found the file, and then opened it. But if he was in Access, and wanted to view an Excel file, he would have to exit Access, open Excel, find the file, and open it. Garth's attempts to educate Dick fell on blind eyes. Dick didn't want to be taught anything that one of his subordinates tried to show him.

Garth was an information technology professional and had been developing web pages for about ten years. Because he liked to write, he compiled pages of his works using extended hyper text markup language (XHTML) and cascading style sheets (CSS). Garth as always trying to assist the company by doing things to help his coworkers, and he built a web page for the company. Dick looked at the web page, seemed totally unimpressed, and asked Garth if he could put selection buttons across the top for selecting sub pages. Garth did so, but Dick never acknowledged Garth's work. Also, because Dick did not have a technology background, he failed to capitalize on the web page to make it a useful tool to help sell the company's offerings. (After Dick fired him, Garth took it down). As time went by, Garth's theory of saturation was proving to be true, in spades. The continual drop-out of widget stores due to saturation and lack of funds to pay for Dick's marketing services was putting undue pressure on Dick to bring in new client widget stores, so Dick went out and got a job selling Yugo automobiles, a job for which he was intimately familiar.

He showed up at his company one day a week. It was a credit to his employees that they made the company run smoothly in his absence. Dick mandated that several times a day, he should be called by a member of his staff to give him an update on what was going on and to allow him to assign work.

Then one day, Dick lost the charger to his cell phone. Not wanting to spend $15 unnecessarily for a new charger, he kept looking for the missing one when he wasn't working. For two days he was out of touch with his workers. He refused to be emailed, he refused notes, and now his cell phone wasn't working. But his staff continued to run the company.

Finally, he either found his charger or purchased a new one, but he didn't apologize for the lack of communication. In traditional salesman fashion, he minimized it by saying his communications were shut down for only a few hours.

When called on his cell phone, he was often involved in negotiations to sell a car, and he couldn't answer it, so the caller would leave him a message. One habit that Dick had was never to listen to his phone messages which was in conflict with his answering service message "I'll get back to you as soon as I can." It sounded good, but it never happened. In fact, Dick's message in-box was usually full, and no message could be left, anyway.

One day a telemarketer called in to Dick's cell phone to say she wouldn't be in that day. As usual, Dick never checked his messages, and no one knew if she were lying, bleeding to death in her town home, unable to get to her phone, or what had happened. She was always very prompt and let everyone know when she would be in to work, so there was a lot of concern until she came in the following morning and was surprised that no one had gotten her message. Of course, Dick blamed the lack of communication on someone else.

It was best not to leave any sort of message for Dick. Dick was a genius in a very narrow sense. He was all-verbal. Writing rarely interested him, although he could write short emails very well when he wanted to. He just hated to read any sort of electronic or written information or to listen to phone messages. He wanted to talk. He didn't want to listen.

At his company, the phone in Dick's office didn't even have a message service, but there was one on the telemarketer's phone, and it was up to a telemarketer to listen to all of the messages each day, and verbally relate any important ones to Dick.

Dick's explanations for his own errors always minimized his own faults. He always blamed somebody else. He never assumed the blame for any of his own mistakes or failings. The only "fault" that Dick would admit was that he was "full of shit" (his words), but Dick considered this to be an admirable attribute for a salesman, and perhaps it worked on the car lot.

Because Dick was a verbal-type person, he felt closer to his telemarketers than to Garth because they were also verbal in that they had to speak with prospects on the phone. Garth was a totally different person from Dick. Garth was detail-oriented and he preferred written communication. In fact, Garth had documented all of the major functions of his job including how to accept and process credit card payments over the internet, how to print and fold mailers to prospects, how to apply bulk mail postage to mailers, how to prepare a mailing, how to present mailers and the required documentation to the bulk mail facility at the post office, and many other critical company functions.

Garth suggested to Dick that he should train a backup person for himself. Dick ignored his suggestion until months later, and then took full credit for the idea.

Another suggestion that Dick ignored was backing up computer hard drives. Garth periodically backed up the server to his own hard drive because the server did not have a working CD writer, and Dick didn't want to spend the money to buy one.

Because Dick was fascinated by DVD movies, every computer in the company had a DVD player, but only one computer had a working CD. When Dick purchased a refurbished computer for Garth, he had a DVD installed on it, but not a CD for backing up the hard drive. Garth recommended to Dick that backing up every hard drive in the company was critical, but Dick ignored this suggestion which caused Dick to spend a lot more money than he would have had he backed up the hard drive on his own computer. When his hard drive crashed, there was no backup for the data on it, and Dick had to pay a computer consultant to recreate its contents, an expensive and time-consuming ordeal that was never quite resolved to Dick's satisfaction because some of the data was unrecoverable.

To save money, in the early days of the company, Dick decided to have the lead telemarketer do his work on the server instead of having his own workstation. This situation is unacceptable in most companies because it places workload that should be done by a workstation onto the server, slowing down data management for all of the other workstations. Because he didn't know much about technology, Dick was oblivious to this problem.

Dick had an all-in-one (AIO) copier that had fax capability, but during the time Garth was there, the print function didn't work which meant that faxes could be sent, but not received. A related problem was that the copier function in the AIO unit didn't work. All electronic communication had to be done by email, a handicap when signed agreements and other documents had to be sent by snail mail. It gave pause to some of Dick's widget store clients who wondered about the viability of a company that could send a fax but couldn't receive one. It was one of the many examples of a slip-shod operation.

From the time the company checkbook had been started, six months before Garth had been hired, it had never been balanced. Garth spent an entire day balancing it after Dick finally got the bank to provide three missing monthly statements. When Dick went to the bank to pick them up, the bank teller requested two dollars, each, for the three statements. Dick, being a forceful negotiator (some would say, "bombastic salesman") the young teller relented and gave them to him at no cost. Dick reveled in not paying for something if he could get away with it. To him, it was like taking candy from a baby. No doubt, a young bank teller was no match for his, "Gee, I left my wallet at home! I have no money!" approach.

In this attitude, Garth disagreed. Garth's method was to pay bills when they came due. Dick's method was to question every bill, and not pay it until absolutely necessary. In fact, every phone bill payment before Garth's arrival, was by electronic funds transfer (EFT) to the phone company's payment office in Omaha, Nebraska following a phone termination notice, just before the phone company was to cut service to his company.

At one point, Dick even told Garth to order the phone company to not send him termination notices. This idea was so ridiculous on several levels, that Garth just shook his head in wonderment and ignored the assignment. How incredible would it be to tell the phone company to not trigger a termination notice due to non-payment. If such notice were not sent out, suddenly Dick's phones would go dead, preventing the telemarketers from calling prospects. To get service back, Dick would have to pay both the past due amount and additional charges to have them turned on again. It was a ludicrous idea.

The amount of the monthly phone bill was around $200, and it had been that amount for the six months before Garth was hired. Incredibly, one day Dick told Garth that the amount must be in error and to call the phone company to tell them it should be at least ten dollars less than what showed on the bill. This was a very naive request, and perhaps it was made just to impress Garth that Dick could make him do anything specious, like making a marionette dance on strings. Garth spent two hours on the phone, first going through the typical, voice response tree, then being on hold, then finding the right person to talk to about the billing amount, then discussing the costs of all three lines, the taxes, and other charges. The representative politely explained what Garth already knew: that the billing is controlled and monitored by the public utilities commission (PUC) and that it hadn't changed materially within the past six months. The representative explained each charge to Garth, and he took detailed notes so that he could itemize them for Dick. AFter spending two hours talking to the phone company, when Garth approached Dick to present his findings, Dick summarily dismissed Garth by saying, "Don't bother me with details, I guess the bill is OK."

Dick always wanted every bill to be paid late. He wanted to hold onto his money as long as possible, to the detriment of his company's image with its creditors. For example, the phone company sent late notices to Dick's company earlier than it did to companies that paid on time because Dick had been identified in phone company records as a slow payer. There was no logic behind Dick's desire to pay late because the company bank account was non-interest bearing, and waiting did not benefit the company in any way.

Dick missed a couple of payrolls by a day or two, although he always denied it. In one case, the last day of the pay period was Friday, and the pay should have been distributed on Friday end-of-business (EOB). Because of the low hourly wages, most employees needed the money right away to pay their rent and buy groceries and gas. Dick didn't come into the office that Friday to sign the checks, and on Saturday a telemarketer called the car lot where Dick worked and was told Dick would be in at 10 am. The employee took the checks from Dick's desk and drove an hour to the car lot only to find that Dick wasn't going to be working that day. Dick finally signed the checks on Monday. It was a lean weekend for that employee, and he had to grovel before his landlady to extend his payment due date a few days. Dick didn't apologize. He simply suggested that the employee manage his finances better. Dick's opinion was that he was always right and everybody else was always wrong.

Garth kept the checkbook balanced so that Dick could know how much was in the account. Unfortunately, the bank balance went negative from time to time, even after Garth alerted Dick that the account required a cash infusion to keep it out of the red. Dick had trouble remembering to do errands (such as put money into the bank account) that weren't directly related to selling. It was apparent that he considered any non-selling activity as being below him, and he reluctantly did such things only when they were absolutely necessary to keep his company from folding.

When the company staff had grown to four employees, Dick decided to hold weekly meetings on the one day he was in the office. These meetings were interesting insights into Dick's persona. They were primarily dissertations by him to build himself up. This was not unexpected because, as a salesman, he was always selling himself. Although he could be charming at times, his two main modes were building himself up and tearing down those he envisioned were a threat.

Most of the time, Dick wasn't interested in other people's accomplishments. He was more interested in expounding on his own achievements. On the other hand, Garth rarely discussed his background because he wasn't boastful and he was never asked. Dick and the lead telemarketer were of the "tell" variety of person and not of the "ask" type. They didn't hesitate to tell someone about themselves or about something that they knew, regardless of whether the listener was interested or not. But as Dick discovered more about Garth, he realized Garth might be a threat because it was painfully obvious to him that Garth had "been around the block" more times than he, and Garth knew a lot more about managing a company and motivating employees.

This situation didn't become acute for Dick until after two women telemarketers were hired. As a "ladies man," Dick was enamored by the women, and he often regaled them with tales of his superiority, not an uncommon activity for a salesman. But the women were smart, and attached, so Dick's self-inflating comments were ignored.

Dick liked to tell how he was a great teacher of Yugo salesmen, traveling around the country for the U.S. headquarters for Yugo to teach selling techniques. There is no doubt that Dick was a great salesman, but his sales techniques would turn off people who wanted a calmer, more pleasant sales experience. Ostensibly, his sales techniques worked well on car lots.

But the fly in the ointment, to Dick, was Garth. Garth had no designs on these attractive, young women. Besides, he too, was attached, and had been with the same girl for 37 years. The age difference was more obvious to the young women than to Dick and Garth. Dick was 55 and Garth was 65 while the women were 19 and 20. In any case, it was pleasant to have women in the office.

Dick had the opportunity to speak at a regional meeting of widget store franchisees, which he planned to attend to get more client stores. As usual, Dick was late getting his promotional materials prepared, and he quickly tossed some instructions to Garth on how to print and fold the brochures, and ran out the door. This left Garth with the assignment of printing and folding the documents. He did so, just as instructed. Dick returned to the office later that night, after Garth had left. Garth had carried out Dick's requests exactly as instructed.

A couple of days later, Dick called Garth from the city where the meeting was held, and berated him forcefully for ten, seemingly unending, minutes, repeating, over and over, that Garth had made all sorts of mistakes. He said Garth had indeed folded one brochure correctly, but when folded, the border around the front was not uniform. In fact, there was no way to correct it except to resize the image and reprint it, which is what Dick had done when he returned the night after Garth had folded them. In addition, Dick decided to use heavier paper. Dick's false accusations disrespected Garth, and Garth realized that he could never respect Dick.

The problem with the second brochure was that the yellow drum on the laser printer had begun to go bad and some of those brochures had very light streaks that Garth had not noticed because they were in the last portion of the print run. In his disrespectful accusations, Dick made it sound like every one of them was bad and that the failure was all Garth's. In fact, there was nothing that could have been done to fix the problem because it was unknown at the time that the drum was worn out, and even if it had been known, all of the office supply stores were closed and a new drum could not have been acquired. The error was Dick's in not creating the material long before he had to catch a plane to the event. Of course, Dick would never admit such a mistake because he never took responsibility for any of his own errors or omissions. He blamed Garth for his own troubles.

In reality (a commodity of which Dick was always in need), Garth had done exactly what Dick requested. When he was berated for the problems, Dick's complaints bordered on verbal abuse and were certainly disrespectful, but Garth took them in silence. This was probably a mistake because people like Dick are verbal bullies who won't back off until someone stands up to them and puts them in their place. In fact, some types of bullying are documented sales techniques that can be successful in certain selling situations, perhaps when selling cars.

One day Dick told Garth to cut and paste a list into a spreadsheet. Then Dick went to the bathroom. Because he had not heard Dick as that only one page be transferred, instead of pasting only the first page, Garth cut and pasted all five pages into the spreadsheet. When Dick returned, it almost seemed to Garth that he had been set up because Dick demanded to know what Garth had done in the minute that he was in the restroom. Garth told him that he had cut and pasted all five pages. It had taken Garth only a few seconds to do it.

Dick went ballistic, berating and disrespecting Garth in a loud voice, in hearing range of all of the telemarketers, telling Garth that he was wasting company time and money by doing more than was necessary. To tear down an employee in front of his or her peers is a major management mistake, but Dick was always making managerial errors either on purpose or because he was ignorant. He just didn't care about other people's feelings.

After more than a minute of repeating that Garth had, once again, made a big mistake, Garth realized that Dick had lost all touch with reality. Dick's tirade was taking longer, by far, than it had taken Garth to cut and paste five pages. (Later, Dick claimed that it had taken Garth thirty minutes to do the cut and paste which attests to Dick's reality issues). Garth had had enough of this, and he called Dick a "son-of-a-bitch!" It worked. Dick fell into a sudden silence. He was shocked into silence, exactly the outcome that Garth wanted. It was unfortunate that this was the only ploy to which Dick would respond, but it was essential to end the disrespectful tirade.

Dick calmed down, got a hold of himself and invited Garth into his office to explain that Garth must have serious issues with his father, a subject that should never be discussed with a person without his permission. Again, Garth took Dick's admonishments in silence. Dick never apologized for this outburst or for any others that he had made. He always blamed somebody else for his own faults.

Dick may have been able to sell cars (we really don't know if he was successful at this endeavor), but he certainly knew nothing of management principles or methods of motivating employees to engender respect, loyalty, and long-term employment.

On the other hand, Garth was a superior "people person," with a stellar management background that included a masters degree in business administration, a job teaching college classes at a major university, a twenty-five year avocation of teaching people from all walks of life to fly airplanes, a brilliant career as a team lead and project officer in the computer programming field, and he had earned an MBA and a Ph.D. in information management.

Garth's extensive experience was seen by Dick as a threat. He incorrectly perceived, either on a conscious or on an unconscious level, that Garth would be looked up to by the attractive, young women more than himself. Dick could not accept Garth as a superior employee who kept the office running, but instead, considered him a threat to be put down and stomped on until Garth and everyone else in the office believed that Dick was a "God," and Garth was a spineless, worthless wimp. Dick saw Garth's kind, soft-spoken demeanor as a weakness that could be exploited through condescending, disrespectful tirades.

Of course, Garth made mistakes. Everyone does. But instead of smiling and quietly mentioning, "Garth, you might have done that differently," Dick's loud, lengthy and over-critical blame sessions disgusted Garth.

Dick never wanted Garth to quit the company because, deep down, he knew Garth was doing a lot of work keeping the company running smoothly. Dick got Garth to agree not to quit. Dick wanted Garth to work for his company, but he wanted Garth and the other employees to believe that Garth was inferior to himself in every way. One day Dick asked Garth to call a widget store owner who was a couple of months late on his payment and ask for the money. Garth phoned the owner's cell phone and left a message that the payment was overdue. As soon as Garth hung up the phone, Dick jumped down his throat for mentioning money over the phone. Dick was probably sensitive to this because so many of his creditors were asking him for late payments. He berated Garth for several minutes, again bringing up the idea that Garth's father had given Garth a lot of erroneous baggage to carry through life. Then Dick asked a strange question: did Garth think about quitting after this tirade? Garth replied no, he wasn't going to quit until Dick fired him. A curious look came over Dick's face. Perhaps he realized he was dealing with a much more intelligent person that he had assumed.

Garth was tired of being yelled at and disrespected, even if it was just for show, to prove to everyone else in the office that Dick had the biggest penis. The next day, Garth told the lead telemarketer that he would no longer speak to Dick and that all of Dick's instructions should come to him through one of the telemarketers. Later that afternoon, when he found out about Garth's desire to not speak with him, Dick phoned Garth at home and told him he was fired. Dick's ego wouldn't allow him to give direction through someone else.

Dick always underestimated his employees, and he had underestimated Garth by several miles. He never believed that his employees were capable adults. Instead, he treated them as though they were uneducated, mentally deficient children who needed to be coerced to do their jobs using the Theory X (the whip approach) management style. Of course, Dick didn't know what it was called or that there was a better way (Theory Y) to manage people.

Dick was divorced and didn't have a female friend. Other than his relatives, he really didn't seem to have any close friends, although his limited spare time could have contributed to this situation. Basically, his life was a disaster, and he didn't know how to get it back on track.

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