Seriously, most sales personnel are egotistical, inattentive, compulsive, lying sacks of crap.  I know, I work for one.  I've worked with dozens of them.  If you buy from them, sell with them, support them, or even rent them paddles so they can canoe down the river of shit they spew, you know wherefore I speak.  Here now I shall document those practices which have given me so high an opinion of the sales species.

• Shut the f__k up: October '07, I was in a customer's lab with a crew of techies for a two-day software pilot. A former DBA turned account rep, the only guy in the whole group who didn't actually do anything, was supposedly there because he had a relationship with the customer. But al he did the whole time was talk on his cel phone to other customers. At one point, he told a very loud, very pointless story to another party about how drunk he got the night he met his wife, a mail order bride from Japan (I kid you not). Customer techies were coming in and out of the lab, while this idiot cackled on the phone. I finally had to tell him to SHUT THE F__K UP. 
• Turning a steak into stew.  Winter '99, an important and very useful engineering doc was sent to a salesman for passing along to an account.  He took the time to turn that Word doc into a Power Point presentation, rendering it extremely difficult to use and print. 

 
• Gambling that nobody will call their bluff.  Winter '99, a goofball saleslady from Netscape stood in front of a crowd at a bank in Minneapolis and concluded her pitch with, "... and I'm going to throw in SDUM too. You gotta have it. So I'm including that with the quote."  So of course one of the attendees asked, "What's SDUM?"  The saleslady stared, blankly, then finally said, "Wait, I know this one."  She not only didn't know what the acronym stood for, she didn't even know what the product did. She just knew it sounded good in various situations. 

 
• Not thinking before they act or speak.   At a winter '01 presentation with a partner company, said partner started out his pitch with his mission statement (Gawd, I hate those).  Except, of course, since it involves the Internet, he labelled it his E-Mission Statement.  Luckily, the presentation wasn't done at night, or it would have been his Nocturnal E-Mission Statement.  Was the title on that slide approved by corporate? 

 
• Lack of attention to detail. ODBC, OTB, OCR, what's the difference? We work with that, I think. They also tend to get phone numbers and names wrong. One goofball I supported sent out a company-wide email titled WHAT IS THE STATUS OF COMPACT AS A REFERENCE? This is a guy typing this email ON a Compaq laptop, but he can't get their name right. I received various emails from around the company asking, what kind of idiots are you hiring in the Midwest office? 
• Everybody in the pool. The same idiot in the previous point pulled this one as well. He decided to have an end-of-quarter sale of testing software. Buy before the 31st of the month, and it'll be 35% off. So he sent out an email to all the prospects in his pipeline, but forgot to blind-copy them. All his prospects saw each other's email addresses, and everybody knew who everybody else was in the pipeline. So they started calling each other to compare the prices they'd gotten from this f___g dolt. 
  
  
• "Oh, it'll be okay." The same idiot as in the previous two points arranged to make a visit with myself and another engineer in Green Bay. I asked him specifically if he'd reserved a car. He said NO PROBLEM, we're covered. So we get to Green Bay, and he's standing in line at Hertz, and finally says "They don't have any cars." I thought you had a reservation, I asked. Apparently not. "Ah, so you LIED to me?" He ignored that, and tried to get a car at National, but they wouldn't give him one either. So I pulled out my National card and got one of their last Emerald Aisle cars. 

 
• Lying to EVERYBODY. A sleazy sales guy I know was also a brutally BAD sales guy. Let's call him Steve. He'd hold seminars in hotel banquet rooms, and often got one or two attendees. Ouch. He regularly claimed a HUGE pipeline, i.e. a long list of prospects from whom he forecasted all sorts of orders. And thus, his superiors would love him to death, and he would sometimes pad his quarterly numbers by dogging the hell out of his resellers. Often, these resellers would say, "Great, here's an order, now go away for the next year," OR "Fine, give me a few units, and I'll never sell your shit again." So he continually burned his bridges. If the pipeline didn't exactly pan out, it still looked like the NEXT quarter would be the big one. So this guy never looked good to management beyond two or three quarters. And then he'd be gone. He was infamous. June '99, a great time to be in sales or pre-sales (engineering) in the high tech world, and this clown coudln't get a job to save his life. 

 
• Glossing OVER details. Yeah, yeah, we're compliant with Version 2.1.3.4a.  Yeah, that sounds right. 

 
• Presumptuousness. They'll want the engineer with the two technical degrees, the guy who could have another job in five minutes if he's pissed enough, the guy who not only does half the presentation but also makes the product stick, to stuff envelopes or get the sandwiches.  They also tend to think that the longer they've ignored an action item, the more likely it is that someone else took care of it.  They were asked to do something, they forgot about it two minutes later, then ask the engineer a month later if it's done yet. 

 
• Presumptuousness II. If you're stuck in a conference room to await the coming of others, the sales guy will immediately commandeer the only phone in the room, to check messages, return calls, or generally just bullshit. They never think that the other people in the party might want to check messages, call home, return calls. No one else's return calls are ever as important, everybody else's business can wait. 

 
• You wouldn't believe how they make numbers sometimes.  Customer purchases five copies of the software, sales guy uses White Out and Magic Marker to change the purchase order to seven copies, and invoices in two parts.  Or sales guy discounts the living hell out of the product so a reseller will take fifty times more than he needs.  Or sales guy sells a million in consulting and a hundred thou in product, but bills it the other way around (the stock price always prefers product over services).  Sales guy sells customer fifty copies of the software, but company ships eighty copies, shows shipping receipts to auditors, and actually ships the extra, unwanted product to sales guy's sister in Idaho.  All this, in pursuit of making the quota for the quarter.  Even if it's going to dent the NEXT quarter.  But of course, sales management back at corporate HQ knows exactly what's going on, until an audit turns something up, at which time they hang the sales guy out to dry. 

 
• Making absurb promises. "Uh, it does that in the next release." 

 
• They're full of cliches. "Damn them, they're spreading a lot of FUD."   "I'm gonna go after the low-hanging fruit."  "I'm gonna take a SWAG at this one." "That deal's just a bluebird." 

 
• Finger-pointing. It's never a poor presentation, poor followup, bad pricing, selling what you've got instead of what they need, or failure to cover all the hotpoints. It's always product problems, bad support, that damn engineer, lousy marketing. On the sales management side, they'll tell you to do whatever you need to do to bring in a particular deal, but when the terms come back to haunt you, management screams about you giving away the store. And they'll never admit complicity in the deal- making. 

 
• Not asking questions up front. As the engineer, you need to deal with intricate DETAILS. So you want to know ahead of time what you'll be talking about, in case you need to do some technical homework. The sales guy will say, "Yeah, uh, I believe they're running on Netscape App Server, and there's some java, and they're running on Solaris." And then you show up and it's a Microsoft shop, and they belt you with ASP questions. If they're not gonna ask the questions, they should give the engineer the phone number and contact and let somebody else ask the questions. 

 
• They SIT there through a proof-of-concept. I don't want some fat slob accompanying me while I'm doing MY piece of the business. All he's going to do anyway is ask to use a phone, and then sit on that phone all day while I'm coding away. It's obvious, and it's embarrassing, and occasionally the customer will say, "Can you make him go away?" 

 
• Not bothering to follow up. You do a lotta homework on a prospect, find out what they do, tailor your presentation accordingly, hop a plane, make your pitch, hopefully make a good impression, and then you find out your sales guy hasn't bothered calling them back after you're gone.  So then the prospect calls and screams, "Where's that pricing you guys promised me?  Where's the white paper, where's the literature?" I've recently gotten calls at my new place, from customers I had at the old place, because the sales guys at the old place aren't returning calls. "Can you help me?  Do you have any other names I can call?  Since you left, nobody calls me back." 

 
• They don't bother telling you important stuff.  It's incredibly annoying to be called in from another room and told to answer a question on a conference call. You don't know who's on the other end of the line, so you don't know how politically correct your answer must be, you don't know the context, you don't know anything. "Quick, I'm inserting you into this conversation without any background."

Miscellaneous stupid stuff salespeople have done to me

• They don't know when to shut up. Visited a huge corporation with a salesguy, for a two-hour talk and demo. Every time he heard a buzzword he knew, he piped up for several minutes at a time. The customer more than once looked at his watch and reminded him how much time was left. I kept giving him the eyeball, but he was oblivious. Near the very end, he went on another tear, and the customer interrupted him with "You've got eleven minutes left." The salesguy said, "Okay, I'll be brief," then proceeded to eat up half that eleven minutes. I never even made it all the way through my slides, which should have taken fifteen minutes, and certainly never demo'd product. I flew all the way to goddamn Philadelphia to listen to the salesguy babble.

 
• This is one of the worst. Idiot salesguy tells me he wants me to do an install in Dallas two weeks into the future. I say, okay, get me the details. Instead of details, he tells me two days later he wants to do another install, in Alabama, the same week as Dallas. WHOA, I say. Both these installs are of a complicated nature. They'll each take at least two days. Start planning NOW. I bug him daily for a schedule of events, so I can book travel. Nothing. The week before, I continue to bug him. Still no details. The end of the week before, I tell him to forget Alabama, I'm not doing it, since he can't give me any details, we'll just do Dallas. He calls me the Sunday before the trip to say he's just booked all my travel (a BIG no-no to me), and all I need is a one-way ticket to Dallas. According to his brilliant scheduling, he expects me to perform a very complex Dallas installation in about four hours, then hop a plane to Houston, and from there to Mobile, then drive to Montgomery, then the next day perform an equally difficult install in four hours, then fly home to Chicago through Atlanta. RIDICULOUS. Then he doesn't bother sending me the itinerary. I finally booked to Dallas, with less than 24 hours notice, got flagged by some security computer for booking a one-way ticket with less than 24 hours notice, and got yanked off the flight. I never made it to Dallas, but I spent hours in custody, PLUS they shipped my bag to another city.

 
• They wing it even when they're incapable of doing so. A sales guy wanted to meet me downtown to go over his resume, since he was getting the boot. No sweat, I said. I told him what train I was coming in on, he said he'd pick me up or meet me. I called him to remind him the night before, then called him in the morning, then called him again as I was getting on the train. He knew exactly when I was coming in. I called him ten minutes before the train was to pull into Union Station. He said, "Oh, I guess I better get on the road." From where he lived, he needed to have BEEN on the road already. I got off the train, walked the mile and a half to the meeting place, then cooled out for another half hour while he found parking. I told him, "We have less than half an hour to eat and look at your worthless resume."

 
• Sales people, of course, think the world revolves around them. A favorite tactic of theirs is to call you on a whim, then put you on hold the second another call comes in. They'll ask, "Can you hang on for a minute?" and before you can say "NO," you're on hold. I now count to thirty seconds, and if they're not back on, I hang up. It's a way of training them. 

 
• Ed and I were driving in separate cars to visit Lucent. On the way, smoke started pouring from under my hood, and I lost power. I managed to limp the thing halfway up the next exit ramp. Essentially, my car was on fire. I called Ed on his mobile, and said, "Ed, my car's on fire." He replied, "Okay, I'll call Lucent and tell them we'll be late." 

 
• One guy decided he wanted to look at some unimportant stuff on his box while we were at a call at a large insurance company. He was sitting behind the table with all the equipment on it, so he unplugged MY laptop (unbeknownst to me) and used the plug to power up his own, leaving mine running on battery. He never bothered plugging mine back in, so ninety minutes later, my warning light starts flashing. I quickly corrected the situation, but when I was called up to plug my laptop into a video feed at the podium, they had to run an extra line, since my battery was pretty well drained. 

 
• Two sales goofs in one week called the travel agent to reschedule MY flights, to better fit their needs. I RE-rescheduled, informed the travel agent NOT to change my itinerary without MY approval, and literally threatened the offending sales morons physically. 

 
• I went into a customer to do a small proof, and the salesguy decided he wanted to be there as well. While I was installing, he grabbed a phone at an empty cube and made a loud phone call, and was cackling away while all the customer's coders sitting in the vicinity shot him dirty looks. The woman whose cube he had commandeered politely stood off to the side. At the first break, I ran over to him, told him to shut the hell up and give the girl her cube back. Nothing like making yourself welcome. 

 
• A couple of years ago, I arrived with a sales guy at a large pharmaceutical company, to install and demo our junk.  I had barely begun installing when the sales guy asked to use a phone.  He was pointed to a temporarily unoccupied cubicle, and proceeded to loudly call other customers and prospects.  For forty-five minutes.  I could feel the heat coming off the head of the increasingly-irritated customer/host.  I ended up answering questions on pricing and licensing, which I don't care for.  When the cubicle-dweller returned from whatever break, the sales dork was oblivious.  I finally had to stand up and kick him off the phone.  It was quite awkward afterwards.  The customer told me I was welcome back anytime, but said the sales guy wasn't.

Driving engineering. Engineers like to say, "Sell what we make." But we've always pushed back with, "Make what we know will sell." You can't hide behind your earring and ponytail forever and expect to be fed. At some point you have to address the market. Trust the guys in the field to tell you what the market is asking for. 

Reporting back on what works and what doesn't. Sales management likes to invent new things to sell and invent the corresponding philosophy that will help sell it. And they often do this in complete contrast to the market. At my last place, they invented products for which there was no market, TWO YEARS IN A ROW. Nobody wanted the first one, so they bought a couple of companies, merged the product lines to "create" a new product and new direction, and nobody bought that either. It's fine to take chances like that, with a small division of a huge company. It's another thing altogether to bet your entire ass (in a medium-sized company) and drive the whole palce into the ground when your strategy falls on its face. 

Combatting the evil competition. Ed and I have always taken the point on fighting back against misinformation, old information, FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), and other foul tactics of the competition. At one place in the last six years, I was unable to pinpoint an actual evil competitor, and it was difficult to fight phantoms. It's up to the field to report back to the central organization how to combat the bad guys. 
 

You get a special blend of moron for a customer in the software world, because the technology constantly changes, while IQ's remain stable.  Like the fat lady in the shoe store who won't admit she's not a size four, customers often don't want to admit they're not up on the latest acronyms.
 
 

Every sales organization indulges in annual, semiannual, or even more frequent get-togethers.  Ostensibly the purpose behind these soirees is to build the sales team, to pep the guys up, to show everybody the "correct" way to sell.   If these are efficiently run, you come away with many tangible benefits:

• the engineers have the latest copy of the product on their laptops 
• the sales guys have an easier-to-understand comp plan 
• the sales guys understand the new product pricing schedule 
• everybody has new Powerpoint presentations 
• everybody can explain the new product features 
• there's at least one successful trip to a strip joint, resulting in no arrests 

At one hellhole, we had so many people come in for every sales meeting, we had to double up in hotel rooms.  The expense can be horrendous.  January '99, one of the guys ordered $4000 worth of  of Dom Perignon, and signed it to the sales VP's room.  I personally told them, if I have to double up, I'm not SHOWING up.  They gave me my own room.  Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, pretty nice. 

The reason we went to Foxwoods was, the previous January the idiot CEO (the one who impregnated one of our engineers AND got hte company delisted from NASDAQ after I was gone) dragged us to Newport, Rhode Island. He gleefully pointed across the bay and indicated that the chapel there was where JFK had married Jackie. Big whoop, I said. It's 5 degrees Farenheit. Newport is a blast, DURING THE SUMMERTIME. In the dead of winter, all the bars close before 9 pm. The place was deader than dead. We stayed at the hotel on Goat Island, connected to town by a bridge. Nothing to do that trip except watch people get smashed in the lone bar. 
 

Here's the kind of crap you end up doing at these things:

• In a format Jean-Paul Sartre would have loved, we all end up sitting around listening to each other's forecast.  This is the purest form of hell.  Why do the engineers need to listen to sales guys spouting their forecasts?  Let the other sales guys hear it, maybe, although even THAT is unproductive. 

 
• Engineers waste time (that should be spent learning the newest products) listening to salesmen gripe about comp plans and pricing 

 
• when all the engineers finally get into the same room to learn the important stuff, nothing in the makeshift lab is ever set up; we're actually doing the setup as part of our training time, and it's common that nothing even works until the first training period is alomst over ; do this shit IN ADVANCE !!!! 

 
• there's always one introverted techie who gives a presentation on how to hook up one little widget in the product to some insignificant partner product made by five guys with an NT machine somewhere in the Bay area ; who gives a crap?  Get the guy a woman, so he'll spend his time on less boring endeavors which he won't be inclined to inflict on everybody else 

 
• guys are in and out the whole time, making calls, answering pages, or just hanging out in the lobby of the hotel ; unless your corporate HQ is large enough, these things are always held offsite at a hotel you end up taking a frigging suit for one lousy night, because somebody insists on a dressup event ; so you have to pack all sorts of shit for four or five days, and in addtion you have to make room in your meager suitcase for a SUIT 

 
• In my first sales job, mgmt decided they needed to show everybody HOW TO SELL ; so they had us all in for a seven-day "boot camp," during which we met from 7 AM til midnight ; we performed various team building exercises, including athletic events; my team won that one, because we were particularly vicious.  They'd hired a bunch of guys who knew the niche we worked in, so most of us knew the market at least as weell.  Bt they deigned to tell us HOW TO DO IT RIGHT.  They hired a motivational speaker who did a workshop, in which we said, "Management has the wrong idea."  This is where I first heard the term "paradigm shift."  In other words, people have to change their thinking in order to adapt to a fast-moving IT market.  We saw that mgmt needed to change THEIR paradigm more than the people in the firled needed to.  The speaker told us, "The pradigm shift is in the room," in other words the power lay with us in the fireld.  Bullshit.  Mgmt was fairly rigid and out of touch with the market.  Ivory tower syndrome. 

 
• The longer these things go on, the more people you lose.  By the fifth morning, half the attendees are very late, if not absent altogether for the first couple of sessions.  People are hung over, they're tired, they want to go home, they're trying to get on earlier flights, and plain and simple, their brains are full.   You can only pour so much into somebody's head in one stretch before they stop listening. 

How to fix these sales meetings:

• have one early track with EVERYBODY, for the sake of team building, and so people who only know each other over the phone can put names with faces ; you only see these people every several months in person, so reacquaint them all 

 
• split the sales and sales engineering teams in a hurry ; have the engineers start out with a review of basic functions, then go over new features, make sure everybody knows how to install and maintain, make sure the new guys know who their resources are for when they go on site and things melt down 

 
• let the sales folk have their private bitching session, so they can complain about comp plans, and make them do quickie forecasts just so they can be shamed in front of their peers 

 
• have  a summary at the end with EVERYBODY, then get the hell out ; have one formal event, with awards or entertainment, but nothing too  involved that will incapacitate them for the next day 

 
• KEEP IT SHORT !!!! 

 
• Also,  at one place, the new sales VP, a little Russian guy, decided to bring everybody in and tell them how worthless they were.  He scared hell out of everybody, made them all do their forecasts in front of everybody else, and painstakingly pulled each person apart.  It got fairly nasty, with most of the venom being aimed at the CEO, who inflicted this new nitwit on everyone.  It was the beginning of the end: after that meeting, everybody saw how the wind was blowing (toward fascism, in other words), and people started splitting in droves. At this organization, the CEO would dress up in funky costumes to start every sales meeting.  The costumes always had a theme that was supposed to lend themselves to sales.  But when people start to hate you, or when the stock drops, the costumes no longer look cute; they look pathetic.  He didn't know when to quit. 

 
• Keep people on schedule.  You need a designated asshole with a stopwatch.  That person stands, STANDS in the back of the room, and twirls his finger in the air when a speaker is getting off topic, and drags his thumb across his throat when it's time to wrap up. 

Wyndham Gardens Hotel, Waltham Mass.  Salon A is next to the kitchen, I think, so the whole time I sat in a meeting there, speakers were competing with the hired help, who were yellling and clinking dishes and shouting in various languages.  Also, the place can't produce a clean dish.  Three cups of coffee, three dirty cups in a row.  The plates all have crud on them.  Disgusting.  I guess the Double Tree was booked.    The food there is better, and the rooms are larger.  The restaurant here is fine, but the catering is BAD.