Sales managers come in all kinds of different packages. I have mentioned before that the best car men are all a little crazy. This is great when you’re selling, but a little crazy can be disastrous when the car man is placed in a position of power. The same craziness that can make him a formidable force when selling a car can backfire when he’s the one in charge of working a deal.
Some managers make things more complicated then they need to be. As a salesman you are taught to distill the deal to its simplest form. Customers are either price buyers, difference buyers, or payment buyers. Your job is to try to present the deal to the desk in a way that best represents what your customer is trying to accomplish.
I worked briefly with a guy named Art. Now the rule of keeping things simple was lost on Art. You’d bring in a deal with a relatively simple commitment like “customer will buy today for $250 per month with his trade in as down”, and Art would do his best to make sure his pencil was as complicated as possible, working the customer on all the angles on the deal when all we had to do was arrange an agreement on a payment. It used to make me crazy. Art did not last long as a manager.
Some managers can be entertaining. Hugh Curly was such a guy. He was bald and had an amusing way of working deals when he was busy. You’d bring him the write-up. He’d look at it briefly while working another deal then he’d slap the write-up sheet on top of his head and say, “Let me think about it for awhile.” The sheet would never fall from his head. When he was ready to look at your deal, he’d grab the write up from his head and stick the deal he was working in its place. There was something endearing about this, and I never tired at the sight of Hugh Curly sitting behind the desk, white short-sleeve shirt and tie with a piece of paper stuck on his head.
Managers can be vain and have an overblown image of themselves as part of the food chain. I once worked for a manager who considered himself quite a lady’s man. And I guess he was since he was married and banging an office girl twenty years his junior. He strutted around the dealership like he was a stud. He was, in fact overweight 40 year old. He wore those garish rayon shirts popular in the 70’s. The shirt was always unbuttoned half way down, exposing his “sexy” hairy chest, a gold chain or a puka shell necklace around his fat neck like a disco rosary.
This guy used swear words as a second language and was a veritable tyrant in a sales meeting room. He used to swear so much we would make bets before meetings on how many times he would use the “f” word. One time in a half-hour meeting he used a form of this word 34 times!
Some of the great deskmen suffer from the same problems that befall a great salesman: addiction. George T. was such a man. A big, overweight man with a shock of jet-black hair combed back in a wild pompadour, George was a sad case. Immensely talented, great to work for, but he used to toot cocaine like there was no tomorrow. After a few months working at the dealership it was determined that George was “liberating” cash deposits he happened to get to the tune of $8000! (Twenty-five years ago $8000!).
When discovered, George was fired of course, but the guy was so talented he didn’t have to look very hard for another job. In a couple of years he was dead, the victim of his own excesses.
My last story is about a sales manager named Mike. Now I will admit to you up front that my opinion of this man may not be 100% justified. I never worked for him as a salesman. I was a manager in a different store, both owned by my brother, Danny. I won’t go into details, but I resented Mike’s influence over my brother. There were certain types of personalities that I thought took advantage of him, and Mike was one of these types.
Let me describe him. He was skinny, about 5’ 10” and bald. He work jogging suits (most of which were made out a sort of crushed velvet) every day—with cowboy boots. Now how does a guy get away with that? I’ll tell you how. I used to call Mike “The Silver Tongue Devil”. He could talk anyone into just about anything and was a Houdini at getting himself out of jams. I used to muse that if you walked into a room and saw him standing over a dead body, a gun in his hand pointed downward with smoke coming from the barrel, he’d look up and without missing a beat give you a plausible explanation as to why he didn’t do it. Given enough time, he might even convince you that you did it!
I was obsessed with getting rid of this guy, and one day the opportunity presented itself. Mike used to go to the local car bar most evenings after work where he had a reputation as a prodigious drinker. One morning in the middle of winter, I was driving past the bar on my way to work when I glanced over to see Mike’s convertible demo in the parking lot with the top down. It was raining. He’d gotten drunk and left it there the night before.
“I’ve got you, you bastard!” I said to myself.
The next week Mike went to Vegas with my brother!
Talk to you later,
David
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