This was last year working for a 3rd party sales company for the IT sector. Basically, we were hired to do telemarketing campaigns for MSPs and Vendors we contracted with depending in a given region they were looking for clients in.
Had this small MSP that hadn't had a new client added in months, which was due to previous callers being terrible. I used to work in the IT field when I was in the military but have since moved into sales and I no longer did field work, but having worked in the field I knew the lingo and what was needed when a potential client was curious about services or needed some other information.
Anyways, said small MSP hadn't had a new client in months, which was the whole point of my companies job, which was to find new paying customers for them. Me having more than just a sales background, I was good at what I did despite being new with the company. Well there was a lot of pressure to get a new customer for our client and having seen my work ethic they passed me this client as a “maybe OP can save this contract before they fire us”
I did just that.
Ended up talking to this one operations manager that was super helpful, knowledgeable, and kind, we will call her Lydia. Unfortunately, they already had an in-house individual who was taking care of all their needs, and my clients' services would not be needed. However, she was in a chamber of commerce sub group that had multiple local businesses that as she put it, “were in desperate need of a reliable MSP to handle their needs, she enjoyed our conversation and if my bosses were anything like me she knew this entire group of 20+ different businesses would gladly sign with my MSP”
Now, normally, I would set appointments with the prospective customers and our client and let my client seal the deal in a one on one situation. However this woman said there was going to be a social gathering in about 2 weeks and it would be a perfect opportunity for my bosses to meet this group of business owners and do the whole shaking babies and kissing hands routine.
When our client hasn't had a sale in months. The first day I'm working with them I get them a sale followed by this lead worth potentially dozens of sales my bosses were ecstatic. Now since this was an out of the norm sort of meeting, not being a 1on1 sort of thing but rather a group social setting I had to get it cleared through higher ups that I would still get my commision based on the deals being made at this event. Everything was cleared and for half a second I was considered the golden child for saving the contract with such a boon for our client. Until the week of when our client asked for some further details on the event and that's when the cat was let out of the bag that this chamber of commerce group was the local LGBTQ business owners association for (city name).
When I was given this information I didn't bat an eye I plugged the info in where it was needed but thought nothing of it. Suddenly we get an email from our client, who was notoriously hard to get a hold of, but suddenly upon seeing they would be mingling with LGBTQ friendly business owners they emailed right away and just very curtly added they no longer wished to attend the event.
I was floored… mainly because here was a client that had been complaining that my company hadn't been delivering as promised. They changed their sales person to me and in less than a month I had more traction and business drummed up than this client had gotten in 6 months with us. The kicker was this was an internal email and they expected me to be the one to spill the news to Lydia that my client/bosses were no longer interested in attending.
I went to my actual bosses with a “wtf” moment. I even remember asking my immediate manager is there something wrong with money coming from this business group? Is it not as green as our client wants it, I don't understand. My company did a very small amount of pushback, they asked our clients if they could clarify the reason for backing out of this amazing opportunity when just the month prior they were threatening to fire us for lack of results and here I was handing them a buffet of clients and suddenly no dice…
Suffice to say a bunch of corporate lingo stating they wanted to remain politically and religiously neutral, blah blah blah… to which I replied to my bosses, boycotting the event after being specifically begged to come isn't staying neutral, that's very much taking a stance and the fact that these businesses wanted our clients services and they arent even willing to respond of their volition and they expect me to navigate this dicey conversation and tell these business we won't be attending… when my bosses learned I wasn't about to do their dirty work they conveyed the message. And I requested a new client because I wasn't willing to manage a bigoted client that also was going to turn down perfectly good business which also cut into my commission. The day before I got a new client I emailed Lydia explaining that I was deeply sorry that my bosses were acting in this fashion, and that I found this sort of behavior in 2022 unacceptable.
My actual company that was hired by these bigoted assholes basically told me that we would fulfill any request our clients wanted so if they wanted to be homophobic and turn down money because of the sexual orientation of a business owner, that was their prerogative and I just had to factor that in when looking for future clients for them.
I don't recall exactly how I responded to that but I know it was something along the lines of we work in the IT field, my normal line of questioning is about finding out what sort of tech security the business already has in place and what they are looking to achieve. “Okay Mr Johnson so your business has X number of networked machines running on these operating systems with in house servers and there's a total of X TBs of data that needs protecting” never would I follow up with “by the way Mr Johnson what's your sexual orientation because my bosses refuse to work with you if your Johnson has ever had play time with another Johnson…”
This country is so fucked that something like this would happen and there's no repercussions outside of a loss of business. If that commerce group hadn't been labeled LGBTQ my client would of showed up and made a ton of money when they were hurting for business. But also having such a label should have no bearing on whether or not a business does business with someone else.
I no longer work for that company and ended up getting fired a few months later over a fight regarding PTO usage during a natural disaster where I was in a mandatory evacuation zone, but then was told I had to submit PTO…
Shit company with shit clients being backed by a shit government…
TLDR: client begs for new sales; connect them with an LGBTQ chamber of commerce group begging for my clients services; after agreeing to meet my clients then backpedal upon reading its an LGBTQ group; expect me to be the one to break the news