When a jealous coworker refuses to listen

Published: Wed, 05/25/22

May 25, 2022

TOGETHER WITH

Welcome back. We’re only a few weeks away from the official start of summer, otherwise known as the months where everyone looks at each other and says “It’s the summer, things are slow,” over and over again. In this week’s edition of The Quota, we’ll tell you the story of the original snake oil salesman, share a Sales Fail of a photoshop gone wrong, and give some advice to a sales manager from Germany. Let’s do this.

NUMBER OF THE WEEK

$1 trillion

Over one trillion dollars is spent annually on sales forces.

Source: Zippia

SALES ROUNDUP

Here’s what’s happening in the sales world this week:

FOX Sports has found a replacement for Joe Buck as the lead NFL voice on the network, and they’ve chosen a former car salesman for the role. Kevin Burkhardt has had a 20-year career in sports announcing, but he wasn’t always a success; he spent years working as a used car salesman while trying to break into the big time. You can read the story here.
A group of former pharmaceuticals sales reps and marketers testified last week in a lawsuit brought by the state of West Virginia against Allergan and Teva Pharmaceuticals, both opioid manufacturers. The reps testified that they knew the benefits and risks of opioid medication and strictly followed messaging approved by their company’s medical and legal departments. You can read more about the case here.

FEATURE

The story of Clark Stanley, the original snake oil salesman

By Erica Furgiuele

Imagine: you live in the Wild West in 1893, and there’s nothing good on Netflix that night. So what do you do for entertainment? Lucky for you, there’s a medicine show in town performed by a man who calls himself the Rattlesnake King. He’ll kill and boil a snake right in front of you, and then he’ll try to sell you his patented snake oil. Did you know it cures everything from rheumatism to partial paralysis? Only 50 cents a bottle!

This so-called Rattlesnake King was named Clark Stanley. He used to be a cowboy, but now he’s patented the Snake Oil Liniment that's going to make him rich. “Good for man and beast,” the bottle read. “The most remarkable curative discovery ever made in any age or country. A liniment that penetrates muscle, membrane, and tissue to the very bone itself, and banishing pain with a power that has astonished and convinced two generations of intelligent people.”

Shockingly, most of these claims are true. Real snake oil actually does help with aches, pains, arthritis, and bursitis. It’s basically the 19th-century equivalent of Icy Hot — a topical salve that relieves muscle and joint pain. The problem? Stanley’s snake oil was not the real thing (although it is interesting that instead of claiming it was a cure-all, he stuck to claiming it could cure only what real snake oil could do).

In order to make real snake oil, you need to boil not a rattlesnake, but a Chinese water snake. When Chinese immigrants came to America to work on the transcontinental railroad, they brought their traditional Chinese medicine practices with them. The high concentration of Omega-3 fatty acid in Chinese water snakes made them a truly therapeutic method for treating the aches and pains railroad workers experienced from their backbreaking labor.

Enter: a literal American cowboy who was himself tired of manual labor and looking to make a quick buck. Ironically, Clark Stanley did credit traditional medicine practices with giving him the recipe for Snake Oil Liniment, but he claimed it was the Hopi Native American tribe, not the Chinese, that showed him its healing powers.

To add to the irony even further, Stanley wrote a book about his experiences as a cowboy-turned-snake-oil-salesman titled The Life and Adventures of the American Cowboy: Life in the Far West. In the book, Stanley cautions people against selling fake versions of his fake snake oil.

Oh, and Clark Stanley’s snake oil didn’t even contain snake. When federal regulators seized his product in 1917, they found it was a concoction of mineral oil, red pepper, turpentine, and cow fat. But by that point, he had already been selling the product for 24 years.

Clark Stanley’s trial for misbranding his product and "falsely and fraudulently represent[ing] it as a remedy for all pain" was a turn-of-the-century media circus, but in the end he was only charged $20 (about $429 in today’s dollars) for all the damage he had done. Medicine shows, however, didn’t truly die out in the United States until the 1950s. Maybe it had to do with the fact that there was finally something good on TV.

TOGETHER WITH ZOOMINFO

For a long time, there’s been an unspoken dog-eat-dog mentality in the world of sales rep training and development. You have to be at the top — but it’s not always clear how you get there.

“That didn’t work for anyone,” says Matt Rohr, a sales enablement manager at ZoomInfo.

Something had to give. So, instead of an industry-standard learning curve that’s part gatekeeping and part gladiator contest, ZoomInfo sales leaders got together to revamp the way SDRs are trained, from onboarding all the way to promotion.

This new learning experience, dubbed the SDR Academy, launched in January. Within a month, the results were overwhelmingly positive: sales reps were doubling or tripling the number of weekly calls and queuing up nearly twice as many completed meetings compared to the previous quarter.

It’s all part of a larger plan to lower SDR turnover, and make sure account executives are set up for success when they meet that milestone. Find out more about how ZoomInfo put the academy together — and some perspective from an SDR who went through it here.

MEME OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram -- Sales Humor

QUIZ

On average, what percentage of the day do salespeople spend talking to prospects?

A. 18%
B. 56%
C. 44%
D. 34%

SALES FAILS

Each week, we bring you the most cringe-worthy sales moments from across the web. To submit your sales fail story for consideration, click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

"My biggest sales fail ever was when I worked at a big telecom company (you’d know it) in a huge call center. We had inbound and outbound sales reps there as well as customer service on one giant floor.

My sales manager was this guy who was pretty short. He was probably just over five feet tall. And he took himself really seriously. He had apparently switched careers a few years earlier, and had quit whatever he was doing (I think it was law but I can’t remember) and was trying to work his way up in the company, so he was all business all the time. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he just didn’t really build any relationships with any of us reps.

Me and a few of the other guys used to email funny pictures back and forth. This was before memes were called memes, and before we had interoffice messaging software. One day, someone had sent over a funny photo of a little kid playing basketball against a full-grown man, and the kid was crossing up the adult, but the two people’s faces were photoshopped as celebrities (I forget which ones).

I figured this picture was ripe for remaking, so I edited a photo of my sales manager’s face onto the kid’s body, and a photo of one of our tall coworker’s faces onto the adult. I sent it off to three other people and sat back and waited for a response. An hour later, one of the guys I sent it to comes over to my desk, and he’s totally stone-faced. He whispers to me that the manager was walking by when he opened the email and saw it. He said he tried to close the window but the manager asked him to pull it back up and when he saw it asked who had sent it to him, and clearly saw that it had come from me.

But here’s the weirdest part of the whole situation: I never heard another word about it. The manager never pulled me aside, never sent an email, and never changed the way he behaved towards me. He just continued on as if nothing had happened, no better and no worse. I ended up leaving that company, but all these years later, he’s still there and it looks like he’s a regional VP now.”

Anonymous, 38 Location withheld

GRAPH OF THE WEEK

Source: LinkedIn Poll -- May 2022

WORTH A PEEK

We recently came across an obscure but surprisingly entertaining movie called Thin Ice, about a struggling and dishonest insurance salesman who finds a priceless violin in the home of one of his clients. Without giving too much away, he teams up with a similarly less-than-honest home security installer to steal the instrument, hoping it will put an end to all his troubles. The movie is currently available for Amazon Prime members here.

ASK THE QUOTA

Want to submit a question and be featured in our advice column? Click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

Dear Quota Team,

I've been in sales, selling IT hardware for more than 3 years. Recently, I was promoted to a sales director role, where I am responsible for 10 account managers. I really like the job but there is one guy on my team who can't handle the fact that I got promoted at the beginning of this year.

He’s been working for the company for more than 8 years and was building the sales department from scratch. But he’s also the kind of guy who only does what he is asked to do and usually just wastes the rest of his time. Since he manages the biggest customers, he only waits for requests to come in and isn't chasing the huge potential of his customers.

The thing that gets me angry is that he could be an absolute over-performer, but instead, he is relaxing, coming in late every day, and exceeding his 1 hour lunch break to show that he doesn't accept me as his boss (he was really pissed when he didn't get promoted to sales director).

I’m really trying to get the best out of my team members, to support them in every way, but this guy drives me crazy. I sat down together with him and we had an open conversation and it looked like everything was fine but obviously, it’s not. He also negatively affects other team members, who are really pushing hard for every sale, by chatting about nonsense and keeping them from doing their work.

I also talked to my managers and their response was basically, "Yeah, we know how he is but you can’t change him." The problem is that he always hits his targets and from a sales standpoint he is doing okay (but of course he can do 200% better, as I explained before). We are in an industry where it is super hard to find new and skilled account managers, which is why we are not in a position to fire him. But I'm at a point where I don't know how to handle him anymore.

Any advice?

Exasperated in Germany

Dear Exasperated,

We definitely understand your frustration, though some of our readers are probably wondering whether you have a right to be so upset, given the fact that according to you, this rep is hitting his quota. At the end of the day, that is his job, right?

Samantha McKenna, CEO of #samsales, a sales and sales leadership expert, says: “I would encourage you to talk to your leaders so that they support you in having a direct conversation with him. Highlight the overall negative impact of this person on the organization. Focus less on his performance and revenue, and more on what he’s doing to deteriorate the culture while distracting your other team members.”

“Statistics show that top performers can actually negatively impact company performance by five times their own revenue. Consider that if that individual is bringing in 1 million annually, their impact on culture can actually negatively impact overall company revenue by up to 5 million.”

She continues, “I would also refrain from factoring in the difficulty of finding new account managers as a reason to keep this individual. He is a sum of all his parts, not just his own revenue. It’s vital that he is a team player, that he respects leadership, and that he acts in a way that creates a positive work environment for everyone around him.”

So what can you do about it? McKenna recommends getting everything out into the open. “Once your leadership is aligned, schedule a meeting with everyone and have a direct and candid conversation around expectations. Generally, if he isn't respecting you as a leader, it comes back to a lack of trust and/or something larger at play (like the fact that he didn't get promoted). Either way, having this conversation will hopefully help uncover the larger issue and also make your goals, as well as the organization's goals, clear. He can then be open to working on the outlined goals, or continue down the same path which could ultimately lead to his termination."

Whatever happens, we wish you good luck from across the pond!

Quiz Answer: D

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How did you like today's story?

Today's email was written by Ken Kupchik, Erica Furgiuele, Steve Rado, and Emily Hill.

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