This is the 11th 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.

© artinspiring | stock.adobe.com

It took only a few more weeks for Brocaw to gather enough supporting documentation to fire Jim. During that interval, Jim had continued without effect to scour the flange industry for employment opportunities. When the ax fell, Jim found himself facing two unpleasant alternatives — unemployment or working for a company that was known as the worst supplier in the flange business. When he told Ruth he still was resisting going to work for Troothe, her reply was uncharacteristically blunt.

“Honey, you said that you don’t want to go to work for Troothe because you think it will end your career in the flange industry. You have already spent months contacting Bigglie’s other competitors without even getting an interview. I think the time has come to face a hard fact — if you want to stay in the industry, then the job at Troothe is your only option. You need to make a choice — take the job at Troothe or expand your job search outside the flange industry.”

Jim started to object, but stopped himself. Ruth was right. Every other company in the flange industry already had rejected him, so the career in the flange industry he’d deluded himself into believing he was protecting already was gone. At least if he took the job at Troothe he’d still be selling products that would allow him to use his experience to best advantage, so he decided he should take the job while it still was available.

Harold and Jim found themselves working together again, but it seemed their paths to Troothe were from opposite directions. Harold built Bigglie into such a smooth-running operation that he had worked himself out of a job. Jim’s demise was a mixture of his past association with persona non grata Harold, the ego-ruffling presentation he’d made to top management and the fact that his numbers plummeted when two of his largest customers moved production to Asia. On closer inspection, the reasons Harold and Jim were no longer at Bigglie really converged under the heading of management focus on short-term results — saving money in Harold’s case and cutting costs in Jim’s.

Jim’s new job was grueling. Troothe’s reputation made it almost impossible to get appointments with new prospects and Troothe’s few remaining customers monopolized phone calls or visits with stories of missed delivery promises and frequent product failures. The constant rejection and abuse from the few customers willing to buy from the company with the worst reputation in the flange industry made it hard for Jim to force himself to show up for work each morning.

Two things helped to compensate for the problems Jim faced — working with Harold and Joe Troothe’s surprising receptiveness to Harold’s and Jim’s recommendations. Joe admitted that before Harold rescued Troothe from imminent disaster Joe had dismissed new ideas as unthinkingly as Buchanan, and he gave Harold all the credit for his new open-minded attitude. “Harold told me about that Deming guy,” Joe told Jim, “and how U.S. companies that were too fat and happy to take a look at the hard issues rejected Deming’s ideas. Deming didn’t get a fair hearing until he went where the managers literally had all of the fight beaten out of them, to a place like post-war Japan. I was in almost the same condition when Harold first came to see me. What Harold has accomplished in a matter of months made me a believer.

“Harold brought me a plaque that hangs in my office: ‘Rocks roll down a ten thousand foot mountain, and they cannot be stopped — this is because of the mountain, not the rocks.’¹ I read that to mean that it is top management’s responsibility to be accountable for the successes or failures of the company. This is particularly true when we talk about the sales force. We set the parameters within which the sales force operates, so we have to step up and take the blame for any unfavorable outcomes our parameters fostered. Shame on us if we point fingers at the sales force instead. Of course, it’s a little premature to talk about being within a system while we have only one salesperson. A system starts with looking at the average of the salespeople’s outputs, and it’s not like we can take the average of one salesperson.”

Jim’s first year at Troothe passed with agonizing slowness, but by the time it ended Harold’s transformation of the manufacturing facility was complete and Jim often went an entire month without hearing even a single customer complaint about a late shipment. Both men took pride in Troothe’s climb from being the worst flange company in the U.S. to a spot in the middle.

Over the same period, Bigglie had fallen a little because even Harold’s robust systems required periodic tune-ups that the workers Harold had left behind were not trained to accomplish. Nonetheless, Jim was surprised to get a phone call from June Calloway, Bigglie’s most senior salesperson.

“Hey Jim, I see you guys are making some progress over there. You’ve been giving us a run for our money at accounts you couldn’t even have touched a year ago.”

“We’re trying, June.” Jim was a struggling to think why June would be calling.

“Look, Jim, I’m wondering how that salaried sales force idea you were trying to peddle over here was working out ….” June’s voice trailed off.

“Well, June, we have only one salesman, so it’s not like we’ve put it to the test at a multi-salesperson office, but it seems to be going well.”

“You see, Jim, it’s just that my biggest customer is moving production to China. Honestly, I didn’t follow the math you were talking about when you were here, but I did agree that the differences in the salespeople’s numbers were as much luck as anything else. I see so much fluctuation in my monthly numbers — was I a genius in May and an idiot in July? That’s what the numbers said. I was talking to Bernie Feldman last week and he made a great comment about the way management structures compensation at Bigglie: ‘You can’t own a job here, you can only rent.’”

June’s overture to Jim was just the beginning. Over time, Troothe had its pick of Bigglie’s sales force. At first, it seemed that it was simply the security of a regular salary that attracted salespeople like June to Troothe, but soon other unanticipated benefits came to light. One important change was the extra care management took before hiring a new salesperson. Years later in a company newsletter, Joe Troothe would elaborate on that point: “In the old days we didn’t put much time into screening sales candidates. If they made enough commission to be willing to stay, fine, and if they didn’t, there was always fresh meat to throw in the grinder. With the investment we now make in a salesperson’s salary, we are very particular about the people we hire.

“It’s funny, but the same salary system that makes us extra picky about who we hire also gets us much higher quality applicants than we used to see. It almost sounds like circular logic: Because we offer salary we have to be choosier, and because we offer salary we get to be choosier.

“Another thing that has changed here is management’s attitude toward the salespeople. We used to feel that any time a salesperson fouled up we had carte blanche to jump all over him or her — the sales force was a punching bag we used to vent the day’s frustrations. Now that we make a significant up-front investment in our salespeople, we are much more concerned about their happiness. In the old days, any petty infraction might trigger a reprimand, but now it would be expensive to undermine the enthusiasm of our high-priced sales talent. It forces management to be a lot more professional in dealing with our salespeople. Of course, with the quality of salespeople we’re hiring today, there aren’t nearly as many problems as we saw in the old ‘churn them and burn them’ days.”

To be continued next month.

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

¹ Thomas Cleary’s translation of Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, 1988) p. 99.