Sales

This is a prologue...

Would you buy a car from the sales agent, who tells you that they only sell the car, but you have to bring your own petrol to drive that car home?

Would you take a photo of your car, bring it to the mechanics, and ask them to diagnose the problem of your car based on that photo?

Stay tuned... I will update this blog soon...

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Here I am, routinely updating feeding my blog with tonnes of office weird stories... This is my only way to release my working stress, I hope it won't get found out one day... sigh...

So, who is the main character this time? Mr. Paramount.

The first story goes like this:

So Mr. Paramount get an order from a customer, upon handing over the job, he only produces two pieces of paper... which was those series of meetings that I have mentioned earlier. Then, my boss came into the picture, demanded for some details which sales has agreed to supply to the customer. One of the main joke, well, to me at least, is the gear box.

Well, gear box, like your car, it usually sold by having the supplier topping up the first fill of oil. However, there was a slight misunderstanding over the meeting that, the customer would like to use their own oil. This is perfectly fine, but we do not hold the responsibility of guaranteeing the customer's oil is competible with the gear box we supplied. In other words, when you buy a car, you tell the dealer that you prefer him to use the fuel that you supplied, instead of having him filling up the normal petrol for you. You can't ask the dealer to guarantee that your fuel is competible to the car you bought? Who knows if you supplied the cooking oil instead?

Anyway, it eventually turns out that the customer wants to run the gearbox with their own oil, but the first fill is by us... which is logical. It kinda says that, your dealer will, by default pump sufficient fuel into your car before handing the car to you. And it is purely your personal preference of what fuel to use after that.

What I do not understand is -- why do Mr. Paramount got so worked up by these things, without trying to understand the logic behind it?

Anyway... 2nd story.

An existing customer from other country called up, asking us to pay a visit to their site, to identify those machines and components that needed an upgrade / replacement. They already listed a few problematic ones.

The issue got passed to Mr. Paramount, he then passed it to his subordinates, who let the issue sat quiet for nearly 6 months. Until finally the customer was chasing after our department, that we made noise to the MD... and Mr. Paramount was sent to that country to do a general inspection.

He went there for a week, came back with some photos, no inspection report, and not a clue on how to replace those parts. He sent those photos to the Engineering Department, asking us, who had never been to the tower before, to come out with a quantity of those items that needed replacement. Not only that, some of those complaints from the customer need some careful diagnosis, and we were told that the photos were good enough to tell the full picture. Not to mention that those photos were zoomed-in photos of some machine details.

This is kinda like carrying a photo of a sick child, bring that photo to the clinic, and asked the doctor to diagnose the child through the photo. And the photos taken were zoomed into the tongue, the eyes etc.

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On a different note, I find that sales is a very important role, because they bring in customers to the company.

It is normal for a person who do not have strong foundations to be careful of what they said. An analogy to this is, when you do not wear your underwear, you will be extra careful when zipping up your trouser.

However, I find that most of the sales person refused to improve their knowledge on the product they sell, and trying to shoot the bull in front of the customer, promising the heaven and hell. It is only when they accidentally zipped their hair / skin... then will they start blaming the design of the zip, the stupidity of wearing trouser etc.

Ah well... I am getting very tired and started talking things off the track... should stop now.