"New Consulting Client"
Our home group leader came to me and asked me if I could go meet with a man in our church who was starting a business. He had never run a business before nor even been a department head at a company. He knew I was a consultant and thought maybe I could help him. I agreed to go meet with him.
A few days later, I drove over to Overland Park, Kansas up off 79th street and met with the owner. He explained his business model addressing the issue of how software being purchased did not always work the way it was supposed to, and even at times was destructive to the computer.
The site allowed users to post reviews of their experiences with published software products, which gave it a five-star rating. The business model was to contact software publishers and offer them a chance to upgrade their listings on our site, producing a sale.
The interview went well all in all, but I found this guy was an incredibly arrogant person which to me, people like this are just not fun to have to deal with. However, some of them can be helped in kind of a “despite themselves” type of way. When I was leaving though, I said to myself, “Be careful Rick, this is the kind of guy who could ruin your life.”
Our first day of training was so brutal, none of the sales guys wanted to come back the next day. All did, except me, I had seen enough and sent a note letting the owner know this was not for me.
Returning to my regular routine, I went to the prayer room later that morning. Shortly after, the owner showed up as he had tracked me down through Lori and he invited me out to lunch.
We went to a local spot for lunch, and he asked me if I would come back and give it another try. I told him straight up, that I thought he was way out of line with how he treated his employees, and his arrogance was unsurmountable and not something I wanted to work around.
He admitted he had a problem with pride but made an offer to me stating he would give me full permission to be able to speak up whenever I felt he was out of line, without the fear of retribution and he would listen and try to work things out.
That willingness to at least try to treat people right caused me to accept the offer and I returned to work the next day.
We began sales in April 1996 and for a couple of weeks, we sold nothing at all. The owner had hired a consultant who had informed us during their test market run they had closed 98% of the sales attempts they had made. After getting started we found out that no deals were actually closed during the trial run, but they had only gotten expressed interests.
They continued to stick by the sales approach they had developed and would not let us try anything outside the parameters of his dictates, and the sales attempt was a total failure.
Two weeks of attempted sales was all I needed to know; this was not going to work. After many conversations with the owner and making recommendation after recommendation to try sales a different way and being soundly rejected every time, I realized there wasn’t much I could do for the guy. Two weeks was enough for me, and I resigned.
A few weeks later I got a call from the owner. He told me they had not sold any upgrade listings and needed help. He said he would let me come in and try anything, as long as I could start closing sales right away. I came in the next day and using a more consultative sales approach, coupled with negotiating on our price point, I closed the first deal for the company that day.
Sales took off from there. We used a T.O. (take over) sales process where the salesman would get the client to the point of sale and then brought in the sales manager to negotiate the close. It worked and sales started to climb.
The problem for me was that the owner only paid a very low hourly rate and wanted the salesperson to close deals for commission to make his pay, and even on a good day, it was not enough for me to make it worth the effort income-wise. This was supposed to have been a six-figure income job and the best possible was well below that. So, I resigned again.
A few months went by, and I got another call from the owner. They had flat lined the sales at about $20,000 per month and he was running out of the funds his family had put up for the enterprise. He needed help right away.
I agreed to come take a look at everything and found that the users were very interested in the information the site provided, but wanted to know where they could purchase the software that had good reviews. The natural course would be to offer the software and make additional income from product sales. I presented the idea to the owner, and he promptly shot it down. That night I was thinking and praying about the problem when the Lord spoke to me, “Don’t tell him, show him”.
Right away I knew exactly what to do. That next morning, I met with the owner and told him I would arrange with software publishers of our top ten most popular reviewed products for us to be able to sell. He agreed to let me try, stating if only to prove it wouldn’t work.
It took me about a week to set it all up. We listed ten products for sale through the website and began selling software.
A few months later, the owner called me to let me know the venture had failed. I asked him about the sales ramp numbers which he thought to be dismal. I asked him to graph the growth in a spreadsheet and tell me the projected income within a year. He got instantly excited and asked me to come in the next day.
This ended up changing his whole business model, forming a new company and adding thousands of software listings, we created one of the first software cyber stores on the Internet. I eventually came in to become the sales manager and ramped up sales to a bit over $1.2 million per month with a gross profit of about 8%.