Susan Dresswell is the Sales Manager at Our Company. Sue barely made it through high school and has only a vague notion of the business in which Our Company is engaged. Susan is thirty-two years old, divorced, and the mother of a five year old son. She divorced her husband the day her son was born and exactly zero point six seconds after the epidural wore off. All of her friends were single mothers, after all, and having a smelly old man hanging around the house was cramping her style. Next time she felt like having a kid she was planning on purchasing the necessary sperm on-line or extracting it for free from a member of the Senior Management Team. We are not going to tell you how she was planning on accomplishing the latter task as this is not that kind of instructional manual. You, dear reader, will just have to figure that one out for yourself.
Anyway, Sue will say almost anything to make a sale and do absolutely anything to keep senior management on her side. She is extremely skilled at using her charm and sexuality to their best advantage. As a result, Sue is the most successful salesperson in Our Company’s history and was the only member of the sales organization to survive the recent purge. While Sue reports directly to the General Manager, she is not a member of the executive team (refer back to Our Company Organization Chart).
It’s a Deal
It was getting close to the end of the month and Sue needed to make the next lease payment on her Lexus SUV. Sales people measure themselves and each other by the cars they drive and Sue’s sales instincts kick into high gear when her ride is at risk. She had a meeting with a potential client this particular morning who looking to purchase sumpthin’ or other. Sue was determined not to let this one get away.
It turns out the customer was looking for an outdoor shed in which to store a few basic garden tools and his lawnmower. He tried Home Boxstore but they didn’t have one in stock that fit into the space between his house and the edge his property where he wanted to put it, which was about six and a half feet wide. He went to Our Company to see how much it would cost to have a garden shed custom made according to his specifications.
Sue matched Home Boxstore’s price for an in-stock garden shed and threw in some windows and ornamental trim in order to clinch the deal. Sue wasn’t worried about getting in trouble for low-balling the bid. Sue was snogging the VP of Finance who was an expert at hiding expenses as R&D and sliding government tax credits her way and reporting it as revenue. Sue looked always looked like a hero.
The Bid Review
All bids were subject to a formal Bid Review in accordance with Our Company’s ISPO-2000 procedures. The Senior Management Team was required to convene and review the price quoted and the delivery date against the engineering estimate to complete the job.
“The budget looks good,” said the VP of Finance at the kick-off meeting. He knew the budget was hopelessly inadequate but he didn’t want the GM to find out that Sue low-balled the bid in order to make a car payment. The VP of Finance could easily slide expenses incurred this year over into the following year if necessary. As long as the company continued to grow, even a little bit, it was relatively simple to create the impression that it was also profitable. The plan to sell out or go public in a few years was looking mighty good. It might just be time to issue more stock options to the Senior Management Team.
“The schedule looks good,” said the VP of Operations at the kick-off meeting. He hadn’t read the Project Plan but he had two guys sitting around on overhead and he needed to keep the factory busy.
The Human Resources Manager wasn’t invited to the meeting but the conference room was being painted so they were using her office. She pretended to study the Project Plan but she no idea what she was looking at. She returned to her knitting and started to snooze.
The Bid Review Meeting was in fact a mere formality since Sue had already given the customer a firm quotation for the garden shed complete with a sketch, a promised delivery date, and the acceptance criteria. The details were turned over to Donald Dickless, the Vice President of Operations to turn Sue’s promise into a product. And that’s how the Garden Shed Project was born.
That was a Completely True Story, by the way. Of course the salesperson’s name wasn’t Sue and the item sold wasn’t a garden shed, but the fact that a salesperson broke the rules in order to make a sale – and got away with it – has probably happened at least once or twice before.
