Beware The Snidey Salesrep

Met a fella at a huge car parts distributor.  Good to meet him, as he’d risen to the top after starting out a van-driving sales rep aged just 17.  He mentioned a couple of stories where recently he’d needed to reprimand a couple of his reps.

Quality link-selling is a joy to behold.  How often do you discover only a fraction of your customers that buy one product, are not in fact, actually buying a complete no-brainer accompaniment.

Yet one example I learned of, was where apparently there’s a particular part on a car that when taken off (a ‘cat’ I think?) sometimes has an element or two break.  So when asked for a box of such parts, one rep always also (unprompted) provided an extra item, a kit with spare parts.

He was selling around ten of these (at around nine quid) every day.  None of them requested.  Yet each week, only one or two were being returned.  Incredible.  The rep reasoned that when a part eventually broke, the mechanic saw the repair kit, broke the seal, took out a tiny piece of it, “and the job’s a good’un”!