Sales tools that work

I received the following post from one of my readers yesterday. He sent this out to his sales managers over the weekend. I'm thinking getting this first thing on Monday morning would brighten up my day considerably. I hope you enjoy this first ever guest writer post on Lester Sez.

Thanks for reading.

Guys:

In our on-going quest to improve productivity we are always looking for ways to keep the sales people motivated. The photo below (above) will give you a little preview of our latest idea. I have to give Bob Johnson credit for this stroke of genus. Seven Eleven is using these chairs in Michigan to motivate the clerks to sell more slurpy’s and slim jim’s. Business is really tough up there. Try not to get too excited about this we are in the earliest planning stages. There is a lot that can happen to derail this idea so we are a long way from implementation. This is just a sneak preview.

The plan is to get new chairs for the sales people and wire them into the order entry and the phone system. IT is working on the interface. We’re going to program the daily goals for calls and sales into the system and if the rep starts to fall behind, a brief alert will sound warning people to clear the area then, BANG the ejector seat goes off, the system automatically calls 911, alerts local air traffic control and we send a search party out into the parking lot to find the under-performing rep.

We had originally planned to use a light explosive charge but then we realized there is one floor above the sales department so we need enough power to push through the ceiling, the floor above, the ceiling (again) then finally the roof. We’re thinking providing helmets for the rookies and more inconsistent performers is probably a good idea. I’m betting a rep only let’s this happen once then we don’t have to worry about them anymore. It's really too bad we don’t have time to install these before the slow summer selling season this year. One added benefit is I am pretty sure the copy machine repair guy can do the maintenance the tech support on these chairs. It can’t be that much different can it?

There are some budget concerns even with the ejector seat glut on the world market since the collapse of the Soviet Union these babies are still running about $30K each but really that’s just 15 J23098 unit sales when you think about it. The Chinese are making one for $25K but I am told they can activate randomly. We don’t need that distraction. I’m thinking once the chairs are in place we have an ROI of maybe 6 weeks. If a reps falls a little short and one happens to fire off in the first week or so the ROI could fall to 2 or 3 weeks. I know what you’re thinking and I’m not sure about the color either. We’ll see what happens with the funding then we’ll get into fabric and colors.

Talking about funding, I noticed someone left the light on in the men’s bathroom last Thursday at the end of the day. Come-on people everyone was gone and the light was on. Electricity costs money folks. Do you know how many Q430's we have to sell to cover that cost of the light being on all night?

As I said this idea may or may not work out for us. So try not to get your hopes up too high.

You can count on your senior executive team to continue to help and support you guys in every way we can. We know you're thankful that you can count on us to keep these kinds of great ideas coming. Have a great week.

I thought you guys might like starting your week off with a little laugh. Let’s have some fun this week. All things considered we’re doing very well in a difficult market keep up the great work. I am very happy all of you are on the team and I am pleased with your efforts. Let’s keep pushing and get as much in before the July 4^th holiday as possible.