This is the tenth in a number of articles serializing The Sales Force — Working With Reps by Charles Cohon, MANA’s president and CEO. The entire book may be found in the member area of MANA’s website.

Ruth Anderson sat quietly after reading the memo her husband had asked her to review. When Jim came into the den, Ruth measured her words carefully. “Darling, I can’t disagree with any of your points. I’m wondering, though, how well Buchanan takes constructive criticism. I can’t help thinking about the movie we saw on our honeymoon — remember Jerry Maguire?”

Jim thought back to the theater they’d ducked into when a surprise thunderstorm had caught them unexpectedly while they were exploring San Francisco’s tourist attractions. Tom Cruise’s character, Jerry Maguire, was a sports agent who woke up in the middle of the night, wrote a compelling memo about the inhumane way sports agents treat their clients and distributed it to all of his coworkers. The reward for that honesty and candor had been termination within a matter of days.

“So, what you’re telling me,” Jim said, “is that this e‑mail is not going to change Buchanan. More than anything else, it’s an elaborate suicide note for my career at Bigglie, isn’t it?” Ruth nodded.

Jim shrugged. “Well, I won’t send it, but I’m going to keep it. Someday, I am going to work at a place where this kind of thinking will be welcome.”

After Harold was fired, Jim hadn’t kept in touch. He’d rationalized that putting out fires and writing reports while under Brocaw’s microscope left no time to reach out to an ex-coworker. Another comfortable excuse was Bigglie’s policy against contact with competitors — and Harold’s expertise would likely land him a job with a competitor in short order. Jim never acknowledged the primary reason he’d shunned Harold — Buchanan’s efforts to erase all traces of Harold from the company were obvious, and Jim didn’t want to do anything that might cause Buchanan to link his name even more closely to Harold’s. That linkage became even more of a liability the day Harold started work at Troothe Industries, a minor Bigglie competitor. It seemed to Jim that from that day forward, he was never able to get Buchanan to look him directly in the eye.

With Buchanan giving Jim the cold shoulder and Brocaw working on the formalities needed for Jim’s termination, networking to search for a new job became Jim’s top priority. All too soon, Jim reached the point where he’d exhausted all of his other connections, and the only person left for him to call was Harold. Jim broke away from his sales calls to use his home phone so Harold’s number wouldn’t turn up on his cell phone bill.

If Harold had felt neglected, it wasn’t apparent when he took Jim’s call. “You should look in on me, Jim. I really like my new job. Come on out next week and I’ll buy you lunch.”

“You know, I’d like to get together, Harold, but why don’t we meet at a restaurant instead of my picking you up at the plant. You know how things are at Bigglie and I’d like to keep my visit low profile.”

“Sure thing, 007,” Harold kidded him. “How about Thursday at Carlucci’s, say 11:30?”

Sneaking around made Jim uncomfortable, but he felt he had no choice. His Bigglie sales were down 40 percent this month, which would undoubtedly accelerate Brocaw’s efforts toward Jim’s termination, so all he risked if he was caught meeting with Harold was being fired a month or two ahead of schedule.

Harold was all smiles when Jim walked into the restaurant. “Great to see you, Jim. How are things back at the Bigglie?”

Jim smiled at the way Harold pronounced Bigglie. It no longer rhymed with “Wrigley.” It was instead “Bigg Lie.” Jim allowed himself a moment to enjoy the precision with which this alteration genuinely described the company, and then he shared his situation very candidly.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Harold said, “but actually the timing might be good. You see, when I came to Troothe, the place was a manufacturing disaster. It was so bad I almost didn’t take the job — until I realized that all of the problems I saw at Troothe were the same ones I’d already seen and solved at Bigglie. Knowing that all those problems were fixable, the only thing holding me back from taking the job was getting a guarantee that I’d have enough autonomy to implement my solutions.

“By the time I came on board, Joe Troothe, our president and owner, had already hit bottom and admitted that his way had been a miserable failure, so he was ready to turn over control of his plant to a real operations guy like me. Because I had his complete support, in a matter of months I improved our lead times from 16 weeks to six weeks, and we’ll be at four weeks before the end of this quarter. Before the end of the year we’ll have product flowing through the plant, from order entry to out the door, in under a week.”

Jim was more interested in networking than in Harold’s success, but he listened politely. “Funny you should bring up lead time, Harold. With you gone, the lead times you had so finely tuned at Bigglie have gone from two days to two weeks.”

“Not completely surprising, Jim,” said Harold. “Anyway, one of the other things that happened when we hit bottom was that all of our salespeople quit. I can’t blame them — it’s hard to convince customers to buy products from a company known for leaky flanges and late deliveries. And based on Troothe’s performance, the salespeople knew that even when they secured an order, they still might not get paid for it, because nobody pays commissions on orders that are cancelled or returned.

“We are much better than we used to be. We’ve moved from being a third-class flange manufacturing operation up to being second-class and we’re working toward becoming first-class — but it’s going to be a big job to regain our credibility.

“Joe Troothe accepts that our reputation will stymie any attempt we make to hire a decent salesperson on a commission basis. I showed him a copy of the presentation you and I worked on back at Bigglie, and he bought into the concept of a salaried sales force. We have to start small, which means we can only fund one salaried salesperson to cover the entire United States. In my opinion, that one person will be getting the chance of a lifetime. If he or she can turn things around in the sales department the way we’ve done in production, he’d also be a shoo-in to be sales manager when business picks up and we’re able to hire additional salespeople.”

Harold’s enthusiasm was contagious, but Jim still did not find selling for Troothe to be an inviting prospect. “Harold, if this conversation is going the way I think it’s going, I have to tell you Troothe’s reputation would make it very scary for me to go to work there. Plus, let’s face it, everybody in the industry knows that people who took jobs selling for Troothe did so only after they’d first been rejected by every other flange company. Salespeople who have worked at Troothe in the past are now considered damaged goods in this industry and no other flange manufacturer will hire them. If you guys backslide and your new salesperson gets caught in the rip tide, he or she probably won’t ever work at a flange company again.”

“I understand where you’re coming from, Jim,” said Harold, “but that’s Troothe pre-Harold and pre-Deming. I am now the number-two man at Troothe and Joe Troothe supports me 100 percent. Take that support, combined with my plant operation skills, add the right salesperson, and this company’s sales could explode.”

Jim sat quietly for a minute. His future at Bigglie looked bleak and he’d already exhausted all his other options. “Harold, I guess we could talk about it.”

“Great, Jim! Why don’t you take a detour past the plant on your way back to work and I’ll show you the operation?”

As they toured the Troothe’s manufacturing plant, Jim noticed equipment similar to Bigglie’s, but older. Yet Harold’s touch was obvious. Overhead signs labeled the work cells, fresh paint covered the walls, and the housekeeping was immaculate. One of Harold’s trademarks was a spotless shop. He claimed that tidiness paid for itself in fewer accidents and improved morale. Despite the well-worn equipment, the shop’s appearance compared very favorably with the current state of Bigglie’s plant, where maintenance no longer enjoyed the high priority it had received when Harold was in charge.

Much of the fresh paint job had been papered over with the same kinds of control charts Harold had in his office at Bigglie. “I moved the charts out into the plant so everyone can see how we’re doing,” said Harold. “Keeping them in my office for my own convenience at Bigglie was a mistake.” The only other posting was an oversized reproduction of Deming’s 14 points.

When Harold routed the tour into Joe Troothe’s office, Joe invited Jim to sit. Jim hesitated before settling uneasily into one of the chairs facing Joe’s desk, wishing he could leave. Lunch with Harold was an infraction of Bigglie’s rules but there had been almost no chance he would be caught. The plant tour seemed only slightly more risky — they had entered through a rear door and the likelihood that someone working in the plant would recognize him seemed remote. Joe Troothe’s office was the kind of place that a vendor common to both companies might notice him, and if word got back to Brocaw, Jim would be fired on the spot.

Joe took a seat behind his desk and sat back comfortably. “Your friend Harold truly rescued us from the brink of disaster,” Joe said. “That presentation you two worked on was really a wake-up call for me. You probably remember the slide that said: ‘The president of a company that hires chemists won’t try to do chemistry without appropriate experience, but most presidents of companies that hire salespeople are quite comfortable making sweeping pronouncements on sales topics regardless of their expertise.’ When I saw that slide, I saw myself, and I knew I needed a major attitude adjustment.”

Noting Jim’s discomfort, Joe cut his comments short. “Jim, I suspect you weren’t planning to spend a lot of time here today so I won’t keep you, but I hope we’ll talk again.” Grateful to be dismissed, Jim shook Joe’s hand and bolted for the parking lot. He’d gone farther than he’d planned, and worried that in his eagerness to explore the opportunity at Troothe he might have moved his Bigglie termination date from imminent to immediate.

To be continued next month.

MANA welcomes your comments on this article. Write to us at [email protected].