This is a story of my 10 year, “long-con” antiwork saga working for a muli-billion dollar company. TL;DR: I browsed the web and played games 75-80% of this 10 year stretch while keeping my small department very profitable.
I worked for a company that sold banking equipment. I was inside service sales, meaning I sold service contracts on the banking equipment. It really made sense on much of the equipment to get a service contract.
For example, an ATM breaks down regularly. Fixing one was $400 an hour plus parts. One call could pay for the cost of a 1 year service contract, so it was generally worth it getting a contract on one.
There were 2 kinds of sales reps. The outside sales guys that made huge bonuses and went on sales trips to Hawaii for exceeding their goals, and were groomed for upper management. They had no idea how business worked but they can sell so obviously they were perfect for the job. /s They heavily discounted product in order to sell. They were barely profitable. They also never sold service contracts because it was not a big incentive compared to product sales, so we, the other guys, the inside reps took these customers to sell service.
My first year I made my goals by calling and working my butt off, and got an “attaboy”. We got no bonus except for keeping our jobs.
The only good decision ever made by upper management was the next year, our sales manager, a former sales rep, decided to give us inside folks a decent bonus program, but it was about 150% of what our current goals were. It was still shit money compared to outside reps, but it was something, and I hated calling/sales anyway. At the same time I was learning SQL (a database programming language) on my own because I really hated calling up random credit unions asking for service. During this time I noticed that customers would call complaining that they got billed for service even though they signed an ASR (auto service rider), which said to put any new equipment on service contract. There was no way to track this down, unless you knew SQL and could get a list of all your customers that had an ASR.
I tallied up the list of customers and I had enough to double my goals that year. One thing about the bonus is that it paid out after you made your goals, so if I made my goal I got a lump sum bonus and no more. I constructed a list of contracts that would make my goal and added a few contracts every month. It looked like I was well on my way to doubling my goals which served 2 purposes: 1. It guaranteed that I would get my bonus paid out right around christmas, and 2. It kept my manager off my back. They watched phone call numbers and call times for anyone struggling and told them they were not on the phone enough. I made next to no calls all day. I would send up a few contracts every week via ASR and browse digg and stumbleupon (yep, it was awhile ago) the rest of the day, and no one cared.
By December I made my goals and got a nice bonus for christmas. When I wasn't surfing the web or taking off at noon on Fridays, I created an SQL query that gave me a list of all billed work for my customers and compared it to what a service contract would have cost. If the contract amount was less than the billed work I would flag it for a call (if I ever fell behind) I also created a query to create a mail merge to all of my customers that offered a decent discount if they signed a 3 year contract, along with and ASR of course). It was a CYA for the next year.
Meanwhile, my co sales reps were either really cool (a couple) or total assholes (about 10). The assholes accused me of cheating (numbers don't lie) or tried to steal customers from under me. The cool reps were let in on my “secret” to making my numbers the second half of the year.
So by the end of the year 2 me and a couple other sales reps made their goals by doing literally nothing for at least 4 months, while the assholes lied, cheated, stole, and discounted their way though the end of the year. A couple actually made their goals that year, while the rest either quit, were fired, or given another chance. Keep in mind that for this whole time no one even asked me how I did it. They were too busy threatening the reps that didn't make it.
The next year a couple things happened. The reps that stayed complained that we had “easy customers” (we did, but not the way they thought) and we shuffled up the customers again. Good for me and the other cool reps because new customers with unused ASR's. Also, the head sales manager offered better bonuses and extra if we exceeded our goals by more than a certain percentage. They also LOWERED the goals!
I decided to offer a class on how I made my goals. Sales manager was OK with this. The cool and new reps were all excited. The class expected to see something about “filling your funnel”, “building rapport”, etc. In reality it was about “low hanging fruit” and “the fruit lying on the ground”
I filled in the reps (maybe 10) about how I got my sales. There was nothing illegal or even unethical about what I did. I spread the meeting over 3 Mondays and got my manager to buy lunch. None of the “asshole” sales reps (there were 2 or 3 left) took part. IDK why, maybe out of pride? Anyway, by lunchtime on the first Monday, I showed them how I did it. By the end of the day they were able to log onto our query program (it was old as dirt and can't remember what it was) and they were able to access my queries.
The other two Mondays were basically teaching the basic sql commands so that they were able to personalize my queries, and how to sandbag (don't make your goals right away. Kind of like the kid from the incredibles running track)
Year 3 was a antiwork dream for most of us. We all did the ASR thing, the billed work thing, and the 3 year contract thing. Everyone made their goals while doing 20% of the work the asshole reps did. We even made it look like we were barely making monthly goals for the first half of the year before loading up contracts at the end. We all made bonus. Then it happened. The manager became curious and asked me how I(we) did it.
I happily showed him my queries and reporting, mail merges, etc. He was pissed! Not because I was making sales, but because I didn't tell him (or he didn't ask) sooner. By the end of the month, my salary was doubled. I was now the lead analyst for inside sales and I got a decent bonus if the team did well. I trained all the sales reps (even the assholes that were left). I automated all reporting (I was into programming macros in Excel by this point). I was the help desk for any query questions that anyone may have. I was still only spending 20-30% of my day actually working since I automated most of my job. I found new ways to approach customers though root cause analysis on service calls. I developed dashboards that were kind of a new thing at the time. This was bliss for another 5 years.
Then the greedy bastard higher ups decided to double the goals that had been heavily increased over the years. At the time, we were selling ATM's like crazy, and this was the time that they were putting an ATM in every gas station and hotel lobby in the world. It was a great run, but the market had already began showing signs of saturation a year or two before this. Yet the dumbasses that ran the place were all former sales people. They doubled the goals in spite of the financial analysts warning them of a drop in sales.
No one made their goals that year. They blamed the outside reps for not selling atm's. Everyone had one at this point. It was like trying to sell an icebox to an Eskimo who already owned two iceboxes.
The response the next year in corporate was obvious: Fire the analysts, office staff, R&D, and engineers. About 50 of us analysts of every type were laid off. A huge portion of our support staff was laid off. Everyone that actually knew how our systems ran were laid off. ZERO sales staff and very few upper and middle managers were let go. They bought back stock. The stock price rebounded as it does.
As I said, this was a multi billion dollar business and my tricks netted the company about 12 million in profit a year. My department's profit was about 60% of revenue compared to the 2-10% of the other departments, but it was just a drop in the bucket compared to the big departments so no one worth noting noticed. There were others like me that had great ideas but we were so siloed and everyone was either unwilling to share their ideas or they were ignored outright if they did.
It's been about 12 years since I worked there and they are still chugging along, They merged with another company a few years ago that was very profitable due to the analystic style business that they ran, but that was all thrown out and the CEO and upper management take any profits while telling the staff that “there is no money for raises this year” I expect them to continue like this, buying out smaller businesses until someone with sense takes over or they get bought out themselves. At least the higher ups will get a decent parachute./s
I now work for a company that at least respects my expertise. I am not making a huge amount of money, but I'm doing OK, working from home, and I'm not working that hard either, which explains why I was able to write this Reddit manifesto on a Wednesday morning. 😉