[Dale Wiley]

Tips for Trade vendors

Make your business get noticed in a hurry !!

Over the years, and more recently in the last 2 years, I have noticed an increased amount of strange behavior in a lot of my vendors. Some of the company’s display one or two of the described behaviors, some of them display multiple behaviors. I pay careful attention to these behaviors, so that I do not allow them to become standard operating procedures and can train my employees NOT to act like this, as they seem to be in a lot of the companies. See if you recognize any of these behaviors and what they represent in your vendors.

1. Make sure your employees and sales people totally ignore your clients when they walk in the door of your business. Continue your argument with the lot boy about where to park your cars.

2. Make sure your employees continue the bullshit process they are in while the customer waits at the counter for service. Make sure the employees refer to how f----- up they got this weekend and ended up puking and damn near falling in the campfire.

3. Make sure your 20 something substitute counter boy treats the 40 something woman in sun hat and dirty shorts like a total moron. After all, she can’t possibly be an executive manager with 20 employees under her supervision and the co owner of a wholesale nursery, that she is in buying parts for…I mean just not possible she could be that… right??

4. Tell the counter employees, that they MUST cram at least ½ can of Copenhagen in their lip before servicing the customer at the counter.

5. Make sure your desiginated office whore wears spaghetti strap tops with her biker tattoos showing, and you entire male sales staff ogles her constantly. Make sure they have a pool going to she who can “tap” her first.

6. Instruct your credit department to ignore clients who apply for credit with your business. Make the POTENTIAL client call several times to find out if they have an account established. Then take messages and say they will get back to you. Then ignore them.

7. Allow your store to become totally unorganized, with boxes stacked on the floor rather than putting stock away. Make the customer paw through piles of materials to find the parts they need.

8. Instruct your sales staff to make contractors wait over 25 minutes to get checked out with $ 11 worth of irrigation parts. Why should you staff the store with any more than 2 people on a Saturday in busy season any way? Damn customers should just go away, we got cable here in the office and get 24 sports channels.

9. Have your office staff stand several paces behind the counter and then loudly comment how busy the store is, and then turn and walk away. DO NOT cross train office employees to help in the retail portion at any time.

10. If your business also has a construction division, make sure your employees who are hauling equipment at night, do not clean off the trailers and drop metal debris, so that one of your client’s wives has to take evasive action to avoid collision with the debris when they fall off. Make sure they throw their burning cigarette butts out the window on a hot July night also.

11. Train your lot personnel to treat the customer as if they are quite possibly the dumbest sons of b---s they have ever seen, and not ask them about various things, but just tell them how to tie down equipment, start engines. I mean, the yard boy is about 22 and the contractor is 45. Now who knows more about equipment?…. the lot boy of course, he sees it every day

12. DO NOT- under any circumstances train your employees to thank the client for choosing your business to purchase your goods at. A mere grunt and handing the receipt and immediately returning to the other counter dude and commenting about that last customer’s “fun bags” to them is sufficient.

13. Have all sales person’s adopt the habit of telling the client they will call them back right away, when they find the status of the piece of equipment you wanted to rent, and then just don’t call them back. After all, if the equipment is unavailable, you wont rent it anyway, so why waste the time calling the client back????

14. Train your employees to talk among themselves about what a bitch the other sales clerk is and how they cannot stand to work with her. Have them ignore the client checking out, and the 4 people waiting behind them, and do not acknowledge their presence, not make any eye contact with them, and hand them the sales receipt without comment.

15. Make sure that you have INCONSISTENT pricing for customers. After all, every sales person is different, so they should charge the same customer different prices for the same product.

16. Make sure that if a customer has a problem with your product, you find some way to blame it on the customer, so that no corrective action that might cost the company any money has to be taken.

17. If you get the chance to purchase services from your clients, that you get a quote from them, and then give the business to the unlicensed illegal’s because they have a lower price, even though they buy ¼ what the “real “ contractor does.

18. Make sure that you give the same pricing levels to the unlicensed contractors as you do the “real” contractors. After all, no reason to risk losing a sale because of stupid laws.

19. When you decide to close your rental store in an area, just put a sign up on the gate stating such. Don’t bother sending a letter or any other kind of notice to your customers, being the total pains in the ass they are. They will find out the store is now closed when they come in to rent a piece of equipment. They can read after all and the sign tells it all.

20. When a client leaves voice mail requesting $ 2000 worth of specialty sod and installation that you just ignore them. Even if they call several times. How annoying anyway…customers calling

21. Institute a dress code that has your sales people dress in shiny dress shoes, apply copious amounts of gel to their hair, wear white shirts, wear $ 40 sunglasses and act like the arrogant b----ds they are. After all, they know everything because they are the salesperson (expert’s) and the clients are a bunch of dumb ass dirty contractors.

22. Have your sales people drive brand new 4WD pickups with chrome wheels, tinted windows and chrome everywhere. After all, they earned that privilege and if the stupid contractors had any brains, they could drive these fancy rigs too.

23. When your sales person makes the every other year on site call to a contractor, tell the sales person to talk non stop, talk incessantly about how well the company is doing and then ask, why haven’t you been buying from us….then explain that the branch you said was opening close to the contractor has been put on hold and you should still drive an additional 45 minutes in heavy traffic even thought the compition is closer and priced the same??

24. Client contact is all based upon how much a company buys from you. If the customer is not conviently located or is not one of your top 20 buyers, ignore them.

[scl]

WOW! Fun to watch a guy vent sometimes, huh? I used to sell auto parts many moons ago, and have seen almost all of these, in one form or another. Don't know what else to say , but I got a good chuckle.

[Dale Wiley]

Not venting at all... I have been meaning to put these all down for some time now....it just amazes me how companies can allow these types of behaviors to go on in a business.

It's about leadership and setting your company apart...it's about long term clients and not short term sales...there are all kinds of buzz words - programs of the week.. but it all boils down to the MONEY !!

I can't treat my clients this way....why should my vendors treat me and MY BUSINESS that way ??