Never, ever joke about a prospect's family

Published: Wed, 06/08/22

June 8, 2022

TOGETHER WITH

Welcome back. It’s another glorious spring week – the sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and there’s so much pollen that you have to put yourself on mute so your prospects can’t hear you sneeze. In this week’s edition of The Quota, we’ll cover the rise and fall of Carvana, remind everyone why you should always be careful when joking with a prospect, and give some advice to a rep whose manager won’t stop playing games. Let’s do this.

NUMBER OF THE WEEK

24.3

The percentage of salespeople who exceeded their quota in 2021.

Source: Sales Insights Lab

SALES ROUNDUP

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

The CEO of Ford wants to (checks notes) abolish the dealership experience!? Ford Chief Executive Jim Farley recently announced a plan to turn dealerships into high-quality service centers for customers who would purchase their vehicles online. A few days later, Ford walked back the CEOs comments, presumably after receiving a thousand angry emails from their dealer partners. You can read more about Farley’s announcement here, and further clarification from Ford here.
A new study released by sales training company Rain Group focuses on sales managers and what the top-performing sales managers do differently than everyone else. The study surveyed responses from 1,000 sales managers globally. You can read about the results of the study and the final report here.

FEATURE

"Carvana - Car Vending Machine in Dallas" by Tony Webster is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Carvana, the salesperson killer, is struggling, and its future remains uncertain

From its first day on the stock exchange in 2017, Carvana was poised to revolutionize the automotive sales industry, with its ultimate goal being the elimination of the automotive sales rep. Yet less than five years later, financial analysts are wondering if Carvana has driven off the deep end – for good.

Pitched as the “Amazon of cars,” Carvana’s business model is simple. Customers can visit the Carvana website, answer a few questions about what they’re looking for, and choose from a vast menu of used cars sourced from auctions and private sellers. In just a few clicks, eligible customers can have their next vehicle delivered right to their door.

While Carvana enjoyed steady growth prior to 2019, it experienced a meteoric rise in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the country trying its best to bounce back economically, many Americans put their savings and stimulus money toward overdue essentials - including vehicles. As a result, demand for vehicles exploded, yet the global semiconductor shortage left dealerships scrambling to replenish their inventory. As demand outpaced supply, Carvana was perfectly positioned to fill the void across the continental United States.

Carvana quickly became a stockholder’s dream. Prior to the pandemic, Carvana’s stock price peaked at roughly $110 per share. By August 2021, Carvana’s stock price had more than tripled to $360 per share, a market cap of nearly $70 billion. Yet throughout 2022, Carvana’s stock price drastically declined. It currently sits at a meager $26 a share, a nearly 92% drop in value. What happened?

In Carvana’s case, this is death from 1000 cuts - cut corners, that is. Even as Carvana's stock value soared, whistleblowers took to social media to air their concerns. One top rated post on Reddit describes how Carvana has “no Quality Assurance department period,” often shipping vehicles with major mechanical problems. Another shared that Carvana’s inventory inspection is functionally nonexistent, noting that people selling their car to Carvana “can give them a total lemon and in many cases get an amazing value.” These stories, combined with a growing number of negative user reviews, painted a dire picture of Carvana’s long-term viability.

From there, it became apparent that Carvana’s upper management had not equipped the business to handle its newfound success. Stories began to circulate of car buyers waiting nearly two years to receive essential paperwork in compliance with state laws while their vehicles collected dust in their driveways. Other unlucky customers had to wait nearly two months for their vehicles to arrive, despite promises that they would be delivered within a week. Fortunately, many customers received their vehicles without issue, but Carvana’s reputation declined to well beneath the existing local dealerships they hoped to replace.

Solidifying Carvana’s decline even further, the company faced another serious blow in the court of public opinion when it had its dealers license suspended in the state of Illinois for failing to transfer titles to buyers. This suspension has since been revoked, but only on the condition that Carvana obey stricter guidelines under state supervision. On the plus side, Carvana was able to bolster its inventory by purchasing an auction company for $2.2 billion… but only after laying off 2,500 of its own workers and, in the words of one employee, igniting “mass hysteria” within the company.

It’s impossible to say what the future holds for Carvana. Like an old broken-down sedan, maybe the engine powering the thing is too far gone. Yet it’s still possible that the company has everything it needs to succeed – and it might just be that the ones behind the wheel simply don’t know how to drive.

TOGETHER WITH ZOOMINFO

How to Get Started in Sales: 10 Career Tips from SDRs

Let’s face it: listening to yourself on recorded sales calls can be painful. But it’s also a massively effective way to sharpen your skills.

So how can you get over the cringe and start self-coaching? First, get creative about how you approach conversations. Next, look for similar themes in the questions you get from prospects, then prepare a strong response for each one.

Take it to the next level by listening to calls from other successful SDRs. It’s critical to explore all the ways you can learn from your team, especially when remote work means it’s no longer possible to casually overhear a more seasoned sales pro in a shared workspace.

This is just one of 10 crucial career-development tips that ZoomInfo SDR Reina Harwood got after surveying her peers. You can explore the full list on The Pipeline here.

MEME OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram -- Sales Humor

QUIZ

How many employees does sales tech giant Salesforce have?

A. 68,455
B. 73,541
C. 23,926
D. 47,772

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).

“I sell life insurance, and normally I’m very good at building rapport. But something happened a few years ago that still makes me cringe every time I think about it.

I had gotten a referral from one of my clients, which is a pretty big deal since the close rate on referrals is super high. I called the prospect and offered to drop by so we could meet in person to discuss his needs, but he said he was really busy and we scheduled a phone call the following week instead.

So I call him at the pre-arranged time, and the conversation starts off great. He is friendly and engaging, and answers my questions and even sprinkles in a few jokes here and there, which I didn’t expect given his serious demeanor on our initial call.

At some point, I start asking questions about his wife and her employment situation, things like that. He tells me that she isn’t currently working, then says something like, “Jeez, I honestly don’t know what the hell she does all day,” and bursts out laughing. I laughed along too, one of those polite laughs, not over-the-top or anything.

So the conversation continues for a while, and at some point, he starts talking about his plans for the next five to ten years, and says that he wants to retire. Since the conversation seemed to be going so well, I figured I’d make a joke, so I said, “Well, then you’ll finally be able to find out what your wife does all day long.”

As soon as I said it, I knew I screwed up. He paused for like five seconds – which felt like five minutes – and then just absolutely laid into me. “Don’t ever talk about my wife,” he shouted, and “That’s the mother of my children,” and “What kind of unprofessional outfit are you with?” He just let me have it, and I just kept apologizing.

I’m not sure if he just didn’t remember his own initial joke, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because he was absolutely livid and the deal was obviously dead. To this day, I never make a joke about anyone from the customer’s side, not even if they do it first.”

Anonymous Location Withheld

GRAPH OF THE WEEK

Source: LinkedIn Poll -- June 2022

WORTH A PEEK

One of the most unpleasant things a salesperson has to do is sell a price increase. Yes, it’s part of the job, but it can be awkward, nerve-wracking, and might cost you a deal. Well, we got an advance copy of a new book, Selling the Price Increase, by Jeb Blount, author of Fanatical Prospecting (we’ll be giving away free copies of this one in a few weeks), and the entire book is dedicated to effectively selling price increases without losing customers, and it’s pretty darn comprehensive. The book officially comes out a week from today, but you can pre-order it 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 work as an inside sales rep for a wholesale distributor. We sell semiconductor products, connectors, and electromagnetic components. It’s a pretty good job overall, and I have been pretty consistently hitting my quota since I joined here almost three years ago.

The reason I am writing in is because of my manager. I can’t say that he’s a bad guy or anything like that, but he’s extremely difficult to work with more than half of the time. Basically, he takes everything personally, and then holds a grudge against whoever it is that he feels “wronged” him, until someone else gets on his bad side, then he’ll become friendly with whoever he was mad at before while he’s upset with someone else. It’s actually pretty bizarre.

For example: a few months ago I took a week off for vacation, and right before I left, I got a message from a customer, which I forwarded to him (my sales manager) to handle while I was away. Well, the following Monday, he sent me a nasty email saying that I hadn’t officially left for vacation when the message came in, and that it had been my responsibility to handle it.

Now, I’m not saying that he was wrong per se. I disagree with him, but he might have a point. The problem was how he acted when I got back. He literally gave me the silent treatment and one-word answers for almost an entire month. It felt like being in a dysfunctional relationship or something. He only started acting normal again when another guy on my team snapped at him and said, “Can’t you see I’m on the phone?” when he tried to talk to him in the middle of a call.

And this is how it always is with him. It’s like he always needs to have someone who is on his bad side. Any suggestions for how to handle this type of thing? Thanks in advance.

Walking on Eggshells in Florida

Dear Eggshells,

Your sales manager sounds like he’s a bit too thin-skinned to work in sales, but he certainly wouldn’t be the first moody person to get promoted to management.

It’s a tough predicament, because the truth is: you can’t change him or his character. Only he can do that, and unless he decides that he needs to adjust the way he deals with others (and himself), you’re stuck with the current version.

So what can you do? Well… you’re a salesperson, aren’t you? You know how to build relationships, right? So build a relationship! You have to spend at least forty hours a week with this person, so why not work to try to gain his friendship and trust? A lot of his behavior stems from insecurity, and by taking the time to make him feel valued, you might actually be able to help him overcome some of these bad (and they are bad) habits.

It would be pretty tough for him to ignore you or to flip out on you if you’ve gone out of your way to develop a friendship (that’s not to say it can’t happen), and who knows, you might just find that underneath his mercurial exterior, there’s a pretty decent person that's worth getting to know.

In any case, this is really your only option (aside from switching jobs), so give it a try. Just know that it’s pretty common to have a sales manager – or any type of manager for that matter – who is difficult to deal with. All you can do is work with what you got; some things are simply out of your control. Good luck!