The Quota: The $22,000 Question
From July 2006
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By W. Grant Eppler
If you pay attention to the conversations in any crowded room, you can usually identify the salespeople in the crowd. This isn’t necessarily bad. Our jobs require that we talk, entertain, explain and listen. As outgoing people, we often talk just to fill a void in a conversation.
Instead of being comfortable in the silence and allowing silence to be a participant in a conversation, a novice salesperson tends to talk too much and fill the valuable voids.
In business, silence is usually most deafening when someone has made a mistake and the group is trying to help fix it. To help ease the awkwardness of the situation, a well-intended salesperson will chime in to fill the void with, “It’s OK, it is not all your fault,” or “I guess I should have made it clearer.” This is done out of goodwill, to help lighten the load of the mistake, as no good-hearted person likes to see another go down in flames.
The problem here is that, in business, mistakes usually cost money. And if you try to ease an awkward situation by offering to shoulder part of the responsibility of a business mistake, odds are you will later be asked to also shoulder part of the fiscal responsibility.
Please note: I’m not talking about being silent as a means to omit the truth (i.e., lying). If you are partially responsible, you need to own that part. I am referring to the aforementioned goodwill gesture of accepting partial responsibility when you are not, in fact, responsible.
A sales colleague and I were asked to attend a meeting with a customer, a medium-sized company, and some of its staff. In this meeting, their accountant explained to us all that the company had mismanaged its small rebate/purchase program. It was here that I learned the value (read, cost) of chiming in versus allowing the silence: $22,000.
Continued...
If you pay attention to the conversations in any crowded room, you can usually identify the salespeople in the crowd. This isn’t necessarily bad. Our jobs require that we talk, entertain, explain and listen. As outgoing people, we often talk just to fill a void in a conversation.
Instead of being comfortable in the silence and allowing silence to be a participant in a conversation, a novice salesperson tends to talk too much and fill the valuable voids.
In business, silence is usually most deafening when someone has made a mistake and the group is trying to help fix it. To help ease the awkwardness of the situation, a well-intended salesperson will chime in to fill the void with, “It’s OK, it is not all your fault,” or “I guess I should have made it clearer.” This is done out of goodwill, to help lighten the load of the mistake, as no good-hearted person likes to see another go down in flames.
The problem here is that, in business, mistakes usually cost money. And if you try to ease an awkward situation by offering to shoulder part of the responsibility of a business mistake, odds are you will later be asked to also shoulder part of the fiscal responsibility.
Please note: I’m not talking about being silent as a means to omit the truth (i.e., lying). If you are partially responsible, you need to own that part. I am referring to the aforementioned goodwill gesture of accepting partial responsibility when you are not, in fact, responsible.
A sales colleague and I were asked to attend a meeting with a customer, a medium-sized company, and some of its staff. In this meeting, their accountant explained to us all that the company had mismanaged its small rebate/purchase program. It was here that I learned the value (read, cost) of chiming in versus allowing the silence: $22,000.
Continued...
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