Boss Life (25 page)

Chatting with Will has cheered me up a bit. He's always thinking about doing his job better and likes to bounce his ideas off me. He's made me remember that my guys really want to keep working here, or they'd have left already.

I'm up early the next morning for the first of our sales classes. Dan, Nick, Emma, and I will have eight sessions, each devoted to an aspect of the Sandler method of selling. We're not alone. There's a group of very beefy guys to our left, all in green, from a gym. A cluster of red shirts to our right, from a plumbing company. And a dozen others in a variety of outfits, from business attire to wife-beater T-shirts and shorts. A quarter of the attendees are female. I'm the oldest person in the room by at least twenty years. The only boss? Hard to say, but I think so.

At seven-thirty, we meet our teacher. I was expecting Bob Waks again. Nope. This is a short guy, balding, fireplug type. He introduces himself: Robert Sinton. Like Bob Waks, he crackles with energy. Rob gives us a little background on how he got into sales: poor kid, from a tough neighborhood, fought his way to the top.

Sinton has everyone's attention from the get-go. He has each of us introduce ourselves and say why we are here. It's a mixed bag of sales situations. Some, like the gym guys, want to respond to walk-in customers. The plumbers need to persuade a client to commit to the fixes or maintenance they need. A number of people make cold calls, spending their day on the phone—the toughest way to sell. And there's us—craftsmen who don't have to prospect for clients, but must guide buyers through a complex sales process and close the deal. It's striking how, after saying a few words about themselves, some of the students come off as pleasant and interesting, while others sound so dull you'd do anything to get away from them. And most are in the middle—not repulsive, but with no obvious charisma.

Introductions done, Sinton launches into the first lesson. He asks us, “What do all prospects have in common?” Silence. Then, from one of the gym guys, “They need something?” Sinton shakes his head. “Anyone else?” Sinton turns to the whiteboard and in large block letters writes: P. A. I. N. “
Pain!
They have a problem. It's bothering them. And the problem might be that they need something, but often it's completely different. After all, sometimes you can sell something to someone who had no idea that your offering existed when you started the conversation. What made them change their mind? They didn't even know they needed anything. But they had pain. You”—he starts pointing at people around the room—“and you, and you, and even you there in the back, you found it. You found their pain. You took the time to get to know them, you dug a little, and you identified the issue.” He launches into a good half-hour expansion on this theme, keeping us riveted. He's constantly moving, gesturing, writing on the whiteboard, asking questions, and telling jokes and stories, usually about his own mistakes.

He emphasizes one point over and over: you need to know with whom you are dealing. You need to understand where they stand in the decision-making hierarchy, because that will determine what kind of pain they have. A boss's pain is getting the deal done. But his executive assistant, tasked with doing the groundwork, has a different pain: the boss. She's going to be working closely with the boss for years, and we need to find a way for her to look good to him. A mid-level corporate buyer's problem is reputation. She needs to choose a reputable firm so she can demonstrate that other companies have come to the same conclusion she did. And she needs the stuff she buys to work really, really well, so that nobody points a finger at her if things go wrong. As I drive back to the office, I think about everything Sinton said. Pain. It seems so obvious. Why didn't we ever think of it that way?

When Dan and Nick get back, we talk about pain. It makes sense to them as well. Nick tells me about a client, Ginny, from a company called Brand Advantage, who seems to have lots of it. She has asked us to design a large U-shaped table, ten feet wide and ten feet long, that can be folded up and wheeled away when not in use. She needs thirty of them, with a strict budget of fifteen hundred dollars per table. And she absolutely has to have them on September 1.

But Nick is having trouble getting answers to his follow-up questions. She's made several references to “branding” on the table, but she hasn't explained what it is. There's also the problem of the budget. Our folding-leg sets would be perfect for this job, but her target size is too big to do with a single tabletop. It should really be three tables, each with a set of legs, that clip together to form the big U. But then the price of the leg sets and the cost of fabricating three tops drives the price to $2,100 for each set. He's stuck. I tell him to try reducing the size to a 9-by-9 square. Then we can make the U in two pieces, each of which can be cut from a single 5-by-10 sheet. We can use two leg sets—they each cost about $275—and still have enough money, barely, to pay for the labor. We won't be able to fit the whole freight cost into the budget, but what else can we do?

Nick starts working on a 3-D model. He has a call with Ginny at four p.m. and wants to show her a model using Glance. I ask him what he thinks her pain is. His reply: “She's a pain in the ass. Her e-mails don't make sense. I keep asking her to explain the branding and I get nothing. The budget is a problem, and the time is a problem. We need to get started if we're going to ship by September.” That's a lot of pain. “Is she a decision maker?” Nick isn't sure. It seems unlikely, because she's so bad at explaining what she wants. In our experience, people with power are usually very clear about what they need.

“What about other calls we got for this?” We've received three inquiries from furniture dealers asking whether we could price a 10-by-10 U table that folds and rolls, but they provided fewer details than Ginny. We can tell that they're asking about Brand Advantage because the design they want is so unusual. Ginny must have called them, too, and when they didn't have any idea how to do this job, they found us.

She's in a box. She's running out of time to place an order, and the other people she's called can't do it. I tell Nick, “I think we can press her hard to go forward. Can we get her boss involved? How about you call her right now and see if she can get that to happen?” He reaches Ginny and tells her that he's confirming this afternoon's phone appointment and, since time is short, asks whether she'll be the decision maker on this job. She tells him that she'll need approval from her boss. Nick asks whether that person can sit in on the call. He listens, then reports to me, “She said she'd do her best. She didn't sound happy.”

But when we call Ginny, her boss, Monica, is on the line. With Glance, we show them the model of the U table, in two pieces, and how it folds and rolls. Each set will be $1,377, excluding freight. A month ago, I would have sent her a proposal confirming all this, and then we'd wait to see what happened. But there's no time for that, so I ask a bold question: “Are you ready to commit to this, right now? If we don't get an order by Friday, we won't be able to do the work.” Monica ignores my question, asking instead whether we would make a set and ship it to her for examination. I suppose we could. On whose dime? I ask, and she says that she could pay the quoted price, $1,377. I'm not happy about that. On a job like this, a significant chunk of our cost goes into the design and programming. It's the same whether we make one or a million. The $1,377 presumes that we are making thirty pairs, and I'm folding the design costs into all of them. Even so, everything will have to go perfectly on the shop floor for us to make money. I make a counteroffer: “How about you order the first one with the design charges included, and if you like it and order the rest of the tables, we'll give you a credit to cover that cost?”

She says she'd like to think about it. I keep trying. “You don't really have time to think about it. It's the middle of July, and you need these by September first. We'd like to do this job, but we need time to get it done.” She asks how much for the first one plus the design charges. Nick and I review our costs: $5,466. She has to run it by her boss. Nick and I look at each other: she has a boss? We thought she was the boss. She continues: send a formal quote at $5,466 and she'll make a decision as soon as she can.

The next day, I try my first Glance session. I'm pitching to two buyers for a Houston accounting firm. They're opening new offices in multiple cities and the owner wants them all to have identical boardroom tables. This could be a nice stream of orders.

Using Glance, we review various aspects of my design. They're very interested. They are getting much more information than they would from a static document. But it feels weird to me. I can't see anyone's face, so it's harder to tell when to jump in with a comment or to anticipate a question. And it's inherently nerve-racking: a live performance, with plenty of opportunity to make an error—to have no answer for a reasonable question, to misstate a number, or simply to cough or burp at the wrong time. Do I sound pleasant, or does my voice grate? Am I interesting, or boring? Is humor appropriate? This is an entirely different experience from sending written proposals.

And much of what is being conveyed is purely visual, but it feels wrong to leave dead air while I manipulate the model. We're so used to a constant stream of talk accompanying any moving image that silence sounds amateurish. I really need some lessons from a baseball announcer, or any expert on running one's mouth while nothing is going on. Or do I? Maybe, in this context, silence is OK. We haven't done enough Glance sessions to get a feel for it yet.

The call concludes with no promises, but they thank me for my effort. I do get them to commit to a follow-up call in a month. I think I did OK, but it wasn't an immediate sale.

—

ON SUNDAY
, I get a call from my son Peter, who's been in San Francisco for a month. His job is going well. He's written the code that allows his company to accept PayPal payments. His bosses are delighted with his work. “Are you cooking anything? Are you eating?” No worries—his company provides all meals. There's a well-stocked fridge, tons of snack foods, and they treat him to dinner every night. “You're still there at dinner?” Apparently the San Francisco dot-com workday starts at about ten a.m. and lasts well into the evening, sometimes all night. Everyone's on salary, so management encourages the workers to stay at work all the time. It sounds awful to me, but to Peter it's simply the way things are. We talk for about forty-five minutes. He closes with more assurance that everything is going well. But it's sad to hang up. I miss him.

On Monday, I have nothing positive to report. Sales for the first two weeks of July: $42,648. Inquiries have been slightly better than last month. Inquiries up slightly from June, but no boss callers, no easy sales. Cash: dwindling. We took in $17,086, and spent $26,188, leaving $76,101 on hand. The cash-to-come number is $67,707. That's up a bit, thanks to the order for the huge table. But next week's payroll and credit card bills will take almost $65,000 out of my reserves. I'll have only a couple of days of funds left. Our backlog is as close to zero as it's ever been: two and a half weeks of work. I don't mention layoffs, but everyone knows that we are very close.

I go back to my private office. I have no sales jobs to work on. There are a few e-mails from customers, but they don't take long to dispose of. What can I do now? I've heard nothing from Dubai about the BigOil job. What about Eurofurn? When will I see the flood of production work they promised me? Maybe I should press them a bit, get them down here, give them some lunch, maybe a beer or two, and see what comes next. I send an e-mail to Nigel and Milosz, and within an hour they respond: sure, happy to stop by. I call Nigel and we make a date for the twenty-third.

Then things get a little better. Monica at Brand Advantage receives the go-ahead for the prototype table. She gives us a credit card for the whole amount: $5,466. The mail, for once, is loaded with goodies: three final payments, totaling $7,275. And at three p.m., Dan hears from a law firm that's ready to proceed, having reviewed the proposal he sent in May. That's worth $13,884, with a $6,942 deposit. Dan is elated. This is the first sale he's made in more than a month. I'm happy, too. Our monthly sales are still way behind target, but it's more cash. I end the day with $95,784.

On Tuesday morning, I gather a pile of pay sheets, each filled out and signed by an employee who expects a check tomorrow. I've been making a payroll since 1988. This will be my 601st iteration of this ritual. There are lots of ways a business owner can tamper with this process to save a little money. Paychex's involvement takes away some of the obvious tricks, like not paying the payroll taxes, but I could still modify the amounts withheld for health insurance and pick up about a thousand bucks. But I would never do that, no matter how desperate I am.

I process the sheets for twelve people. They spent, in total, 847 hours working for me over the last two weeks, about thirty-six hours per person, eight of which were a paid holiday. Some of the shop floor guys are taking unpaid days off—they know we're running out of work and they're staying home in order to delay the day when there's nothing to do. In the short term, that saves me a little money, but if we don't get the work done and out the door, we won't get paid for it. I need that cash. My last payroll cost me $23,014. This one should be similar. Pam, my longtime bookkeeper, tells me that the bills for today total $14,130. Half of that is payments to our materials suppliers—wood and hardware companies. A big piece of it, $7,595, is from Independence Blue Cross. I hate them—they've been jacking my rates up 10 to 20 percent every year since the turn of the century. Theirs is one bill that I routinely pay late, but after three weeks, they always send me a cancellation notice. This month I'm out of time. We'll have to pay it.