Never mind the quality, feel the width

I work in IT Support, so you’d think I’d have some pretty funny stories about customers, and I do. Customers are contradictory, capricious, carping, and other words that begin with “c” (yes, sometimes even that). But, you know, I would take a difficult customer any day over a Sales rep.

Sales, sales, sales. They say we can’t do without them but there are times when that’s patently untrue. Recently, I got off the phone with a Sales rep handling a large utilities company. The man had never met me, or spoken to me before, but that didn’t stop a kind of patronising tirade that basically put all the blame for a current issue at the feet of the company (that is, the company both he and I work for) and absolutely none at the feet of the customer. This is despite the fact I had investigated the issue and found issues and missteps on both sides.

Last month, I had the “pleasure” of attending the call with two Sales reps (the account is rather large). When a couple of us from Consulting and Support pointed out that, in fact, the customer had — in public — said A, B and C, directly contradicting our own analyses of what had gone wrong in a particular situation, our esteemed sales-oriented colleagues had the gall to suggest that while those were the words that were said, we were deficient in “not reading the body language correctly”. At several phone conferences??!! You guessed it; it was Our Fault once again.

These two accounts have one thing in common. The Sales teams are putting together substantial proposals for future business from the customers concerned. So, while they have an all-expenses trip to Bora Bora on the cards, everything that goes wrong at the customer’s site is our problem. They just want to swan in, host lunches and expense it and, in the meantime, leave us with the heavy lifting. Next time, I’ll ask if I get a cut of their commission for making their job so much easier.

Sales reps will do anything to make a commission, and that includes selling their peers, and the company that pays them their salary and bonuses, down the river if need be. I remember the rep who sold a customer ten servers, but only charged them for three support licenses. “Just rotate the licenses to whatever box is giving trouble,” he told the customer, “and that way you’re 100% covered.” Or the rep who didn’t sell any Support at all, but still assured the customer that bugs would be fixed. Guess who used to cop the irate overseas phone calls while he was off in Hawaii getting a suntan?

And there’s the whining. “Oh why can’t you give them X and Y free of charge? They have the potential to turn into a Very Important Customer, and you’re being an obstacle by insisting we follow the rules.” And I have a company-paid holiday hanging on this, doncha know?

And then there’s the shifting of blame. Because, of course, it’s never Sales’ fault that they can’t estimate their way out of a paper bag. “We lost the deal because Consulting didn’t come up with a competitive value proposition.” “If Support Services hadn’t demanded pre-conditions from the customer, we would’ve won the deal.” “Legal didn’t vet the agreement within the accepted time-frame.” It’s never, ever the fault of the Sales rep. Listening to them (and I used to have some small lever of control over a regional Sales team at one point), you’d think they were nothing more than dandelion flowers of fate, prey to every capricious whim that dares blow their way. Poor darlings.

Of course, ever since I’ve decided not to take any more bullshit from the Sales reps I’m forced to deal with, not one has contacted me. Typical, isn’t it? You finally work yourself up to scorching the bastards where they stand, and they don’t front up at all.