Sleazy salesman meets his match in IT truth tellers

I’m sure most of us have worked with someone desperately trying to prove their worth to the company and, in the process, making life difficult for everyone else. Sometimes their shenanigans go to extremes. Here’s my story of working with a salesman who unloaded impossible demands on the tech department and one too many improbable promises to customers.

I was working at a midsize office, where the tech team kept tabs on internal IT and built systems for external clients. At that point, I’d been the senior tech at the company for four years.

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We had never met this salesman, but he was hired by the owner as an “outside sales” expert. I have no idea how the deal was put together except for the fact that he worked on pure commission — which made him desperate to sell, sell, sell. As for his his “clever” way of doing this? Lie to clients and leave the tech department with the responsibility of meeting his sales pitch.

Promise the moon until you hit a crater

He promised clients anything and everything, including software that didn’t exist or systems that couldn’t be built, due to combinations of parts that simply could not coexist or were beyond the hardware limitations. He promised service contracts that couldn’t be upheld, such as guaranteeing it would take 30 minutes or less to fix a system, when it would take longer just to drive to the site.

As the senior tech, I explained to him many times why the systems he’d promised couldn’t be built, outlined why the service contracts were impossible to meet, showed him why the software couldn’t be sold, and offered realistic solutions and alternate configurations.

In response, he flew into a rage, got up in my face, and screamed that he was the highly paid salesman and we were the monkeys who did his bidding. If he sold it and the customers wanted it, we had to build it — no questions or excuses. He told me that he didn’t care if it was impossible to build. My job was to get my lazy butt into the shop and build it because his job was more important than mine, because he made more money than I did.

This happened several times over the course of two or three months. More than one incident included physical threats of violence and veiled threats against my employment. Other employees had similar run-ins with him.

At one point, I asked him how much money he’d be making if the owner found out he was lying to his customers about what could and couldn’t be done. That didn’t seem to get through to him, either.

The golden boy goes unpunished

I tried talking to the owner about this. As expected, it did no good. He waved it away and said he didn’t want to hear about one little mistake (though they had turned into a litany by now). Plus, this salesman was his golden boy, lavished with public praise and seen as doing no wrong.

But there’s power in keeping a paper trail of events, and the only way to get through to the owner was to let the evidence mount up until the inevitable occurred. I kept diligent documentation and followed proper procedure by filing them to the inbox on the owner’s desk, though he never looked at it.

Nonetheless, it piled up: a copy of each work order, sales receipt, and service contract. Everything was there, in the salesman’s own handwriting, and followed by the tech team’s notes of “can’t build,” “does not exist,” or “cannot meet contractual obligations” with explanations as to why not.

Cause and effect

Eventually, the efforts paid off. The salesman’s actions exploded in his face one day when a large corporate customer sent a rep to the office to complain. Their calls to the salesman hadn’t sorted the mess out, so they showed up in person to talk to the owner.

He was furious and had no idea what was going on — because he never checked his inbox and waved away attempts to talk to him. When he called me into his office to find out why we hadn’t honored any of the work orders or contracts, I pulled everything out of his inbox and showed it to him.

The owner was furious and fired the salesman on the spot. “One little mistake” had turned into an avalanche of stupidity. We saw this salesman soon after, selling used cars down the road. And we got back to filling sales and service orders based on reality.

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This story, “Sleazy salesman meets his match in IT truth tellers,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more crazy-but-true stories in the anonymous Off the Record blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.