Jim Sinur

Sherry and I decided to sit through a time sharing pitch because we were interested in increasing our inventory of prepaid vacation time. We have had a good experience with time sharing and have been leveraging the time sharing experience since the 80’s. We have traded all over the world successfully. We were customers of the company that was presenting to us, so we knew a great deal about the company, so went into the sales process wanting to buy with this company.

The process started out good with a promise to take 90 minutes the day before while we picked out a discounted activity. We chose a romantic dinner cruise. The presales person promised an efficient and quick process, so we could enjoy our Hawaiian visit. The presales person also helped us plan our week and was extremely helpful. The process started better than we expected, but it went downhill from there.

The Customer is a Victim:

We showed up to the registration desk early, skipped the continental breakfast offering and sat down with the very experienced sales representative with a good attitude. He explained the benefits and threw down a ridiculous number for us to increase our inventory. I told him that his number was out of the ball park.

It turns out that neither he nor his managers had read our customer record. Had they done that, they would have known that we had a contract that fixed the cost and all we had to do was add some more points at a fixed cost. Obviously, the sales team did not want to honor that contract. They, instead, kept pounding the benefits and wanted us to agree to upgrade without a price. This went round and round for over 120 minutes (30 minutes over the promised duration) and the team tried every stalling tactic in the book, including putting us in front of a video we had already seen in our room, until a sales manager could talk to us(sounds like a used car selling process).

We, then, put the sales person on a 5 minute clock to resolve this or we would walk. After all they were now stealing our time. Making a long story short, we walked away despite the intervention of a hawkish sales manager, who really blew any chance of a deal with his arrogance.

The Employees are Victims:

The sales folks ended up with no commission and two very upset customers who went into the process with a buying attitude. If the sales team had prepared ahead of time instead of saying trying fear tactics, they would have won a small deal. It didn’t get ugly, but it was tense and completely unnecessary.

The Shareholders are Victims:

Not only did we decide not to buy this time, we have decided not to increase our inventory with this company, but with another company we have worked with in the past.

Everybody lost in this process. Are you aware of bad processes?

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Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules     Tags: BPM, Business Process Improvement, Business Rules

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