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TomS
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Post by TomS »

Sorry, Father. Have no time to read all that stuff; It's Sunday!

Pastor Zig says that I need to write my goals for the next week,
make sure I have enough paper for my Ben Franklin close tactic

that windmill close just never seemed to work for me! :D

stand in front of the mirror and say my affirmations

and most importantly set that "Opportunity Clock" for Monday morning! :)

BTW, has anyone seen my "TUIT"? Can't leave the house without that all important tool to help overcome objections!

http://myrtlewoodgallery.com/get_a_round_tuit.htm

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They say that I am bad news. They say "Stay Away."

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stumbler
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Post by stumbler »

TomS wrote:
stumbler wrote:

... no matter what the human cost was to them or how long I badgered them in order to extract the premium.

Fine. So this is how YOU conducted yourself as a salesperson.

I never have.

Sadly, had I been your manager and you did indeed not conduct yourself that way, I would have fired you. I fired a lot of people.

And I wouldn't have given a second thought to whether you needed your meager income or not - and it would have been meager indeed, given that you refused to do your assigned task (making a profit) with integrity and professional dispassion.

In the Bible, we read that we can not serve two masters. When your "master" at work demands that you maximize profit, and it is your job to serve that master as long as you work for him, it can indeed be impossible to follow a different master.

I don't mean to be cruel, but if you, as a salesperson, are not making all the money you can, then you are doing a poor job.

The choice you make is to cheat your boss rather than your customer.

In my opinion, the question you should ask yourself is whether you might be able to find a job wherein you are not cheating anyone, as I eventually did.

  • Stumbler, a poor sinner
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TomS
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Post by TomS »

stumbler wrote:

The choice you make is to cheat your boss rather than your customer.

Ahhh. But I AM the boss.

stumbler wrote:

In my opinion, the question you should ask yourself is whether you might be able to find a job wherein you are not cheating anyone, as I eventually did.

I already have; and have been doing so for 25 years.

The problem, stumbler, is in order to excuse your past actions, you feel the need to condemn a whole industry, and along with it, all who still work in it.

The problem was YOU and the choices YOU made; not the least being the ethics of the organization that you chose to work for and emulate.

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They say that I am bad news. They say "Stay Away."

Pravoslavnik
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Post by Pravoslavnik »

Joanna asked what the point is in quoting St. Seraphim of Sarov's comparison of "trading" to acquire the Holy Spirit (from the conversation with Motovilov) with mercantilism. The point, perhaps a bit too subtle for some of our fellow Christianski, goes directly to the core of the discussion on this thread. Worldly riches, and "trading" to acquire them, will simply avail us nothing in the world to come, in contrast to the Protestant teachings regarding the "gospel of wealth." That is precisely what St. Seraphim was getting at, Joanna, and it is also the point made in the vignette from the Desert Fathers on this thread where the gold was buried in the desert at Scetis. Comprende?

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stumbler
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Post by stumbler »

TomS wrote:
stumbler wrote:

The choice you make is to cheat your boss rather than your customer.

Ahhh. But I AM the boss.

stumbler wrote:

In my opinion, the question you should ask yourself is whether you might be able to find a job wherein you are not cheating anyone, as I eventually did.

I already have; and have been doing so for 25 years.

The problem, stumbler, is in order to excuse your past actions, you feel the need to condemn a whole industry, and along with it, all who still work in it.

The problem was YOU and the choices YOU made; not the least being the ethics of the organization that you chose to work for and emulate.

I am not trying to excuse my actions - I am sharing the choices I made at various times in my life.

The "organization" was not merely ONE organization - it was an industry. I worked for 4 of the largest companies in the known universe - including the three largest.

We all did the same thing - and we were damned (pardon the pun) good at it.

It is interesting to me that in one of my past posts I spoke about the fact that Zig et al taught me to blame the victim for the crime - and here you are doing exactly that.

I sincerely wish you the best of luck, as you seem pretty far gone.

Lucky for me, I was a mere youngster when I learned the sales business. It was easier for me to recover.

If you're not cheating people, you are incompetent. If you are cheating people, you are flirting with immorality.

It's Hobson's choice, and you are welcome to it.

If you think that you can be a good salesman and be "moral," you are quite mistaken.

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TomS
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Post by TomS »

What industry? What type of sales, B2B or B2C?

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stumbler
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Post by stumbler »

As I stated, the automobile industry.

We sold to all end-users, including businesses and private parties.

And we never left a penny on the table if we could help it. If we left them with any money in their pockets, it would only have been because we failed to get them to empty their pockets onto the table before sitting down at said table and scooping up said money. (That's a verbal smackdown and a firing if I found money that wasn't hidden but wasn't offered when I came out to close a deal. My job as a closer was to polish the gems, not to dig for them.)

Were we concerned about customer satisfaction? No. We were concerned that customers would tell Corporate that they were satisfied. So the left hand picked the pocket of thousands of dollars while the right hand graciously, and with great fanfare, offered a free oil change (retail value $20) if our customer satisfaction survey came back with 100% positive replies.

It's not rocket science.

I was encouraged to do despicable things, which I did. I spent four of a man's last hours on earth talking him into paying full sticker price for a Chevy S-10 that we would easily have sold him at invoice price.

He sat there on oxygen, suffering from cancer, and I, on my first day after my promotion into management, was told to show my boss what I could make happen profit-wise.

So I did it.

Wow! I am so cool! I wasted a dying man's time because being a "closer" and working in sales is an honourable profession. Not!

Every salesperson I know who has heard me tell that story says "Good job! It's not like he was going to take it with him!"

Every civilian says "How could you do that?"

How? It was my job, and it was legal, and I felt obligated to do the best job I could (which was pretty darned good) for my boss.

I understand why I did it. It is also some of what motivated me to not put myself in a position where such a thing was required of me again.

At a certain point, Tom, you will cheat your boss, yourself or your customer.

Salespeople do not create anything of value. Salespeople, at best, transfer sales from one company to another. There is no added value, other than a larger profit which might be extracted from a customer by feigning a "friendly" relationship or a spurious "special deal."

Salespeople are there to inflame people's materialistic desires, feed them fantasies of "value" and separate them from their money.

It's not really much different from being a stripper or a prostitute. You make people want things and convince them they NEED those things and stir the desires until they lose all rational sense and pay you whatever you tell them it will take to satisfy their lust.

Maybe one day you will see things more clearly.

At a certain point, I realized that my abilities to talk people into buying things and teaching others how to overcome objections and build value into relatively worthless products was just as dangerous as a gun or a knife.

I surrendered my weapons and moved on.

As the Gospel says, when one is a child one plays with childish things.

-Stumbler, a poor sinner

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