In today's episode of What Could Go Wrong? the case of the salesforce pitted against each other.
I am leaving this company, so the amount of fucks given by me can be quantified as zero. However, for your amusement, I didn't want to withhold this precious jewel.
Situation:
My current company sells financial and erp-software, and consultancy and engineer services that go with it. There are currently three salespeople, myself included. Our sales manager is also the company's CEO.
We sell three different products/platforms. Let's call them Red, Yellow and Blue. Red and Yellow are somewhat overlapping each other, Blue is a totally different thing. The sales reps are solely responsible for their product/platform.
There is Yulia Yellow, she is responsible for promoting Yellow. She's in her 30s, not really a team-player, but helpful and generally cool to work with. Rudolph Red is an asshole. He was involved in the founding of the company, and is also a sales rep. I might as well call him Harvey Dent, because of… You know what, that doesn't matter, right now, I'll get back to him.
I am responsible for selling Blue (I'm Bobby Blue). I sell the software and the services for this product, I have my own set of clients, and I deal with marketing directly for stuff I need.
It turns out, there are numerous companies that work with the precursor software for Red, like a forerunner. An outdated system that needs to be replaced. And these companies could start working with Red, however, for some of them it would actually make more sense to switch to Blue, since it would cover more of their companies' needs.
New strategy
Recently we had a meeting, well, an audience, with the SM/CEO. During this meeting he explained the following plan for FY 2023; if a client had been working with, let's call it pre-Red and would now move over to Blue, then Rudolph would have to hand over this client to me, Bobby Blue. Any sales that come out of this will count against my target, and not Rudolph's. The same goes for any account that Yulia is dealing with; if Yellow is not a match, she will transfer them to either Red or Blue, and Rudolph or me would service the account, and take credit for any sales.
Of course, this also works the other way around. If my client no longer uses the features the Blue was specifically developed for, and instead would be better served working with Red or Yellow, I would transfer them right away. Go team, right? At least, that's how I feel about it.
Well, no. Because we are all evaluated on our individual sales, this would count as a lost client for Rudolph, a gained client (and sales) for me, and Rudolph would not be recognized for it.
This, he could not stomach. So there have been two things happening:
- Rudolph has started to target pre-Red clients, to get the ball rolling before end-of-year, so he can claim ownership.
- Rudolph has been talking to companies that make 'add-ons' for Red, that perform some of the same tasks that Blue is designed for.
So he is willingly fucking me over on existing clients, and trying to force me out by proposing sub-optimal solutions with lots of add-ons, as opposed to our own very well designed product.
And the SM/CEO thinks this will promote a healthy competitive culture.
I confronted him about this idea, and explained what was surely going to happen, which he downplayed as an exaggeration (despite the fact that it is happening, and he is aware of it). So I told him, well, in that case, promote a Team Target, and individual secondary targets. His response? He doesn't “believe” in a team target. That's it.
On top of all this; SM/CEO “manages” one account of Blue, where he recently went and sold more services. I got screwed twice on that deal:
- None of it goes towards my sales, despite this being a Blue client
- As he sold services, I now no longer have an engineer available that I can sell, so how am I supposed to get anything done?
My head is spinning from this much stupidity. Thankfully I'm leaving.