Freezing Vodka - Part One

Fabi was my first sales manager at Cox Business Services. I remember that I had one interview with her and she offered me the job. At the time, I had been in sales for over ten years but had no outside sales experience. In every outside sales job I interviewed for, my lack of experience was discussed and scrutinized, but not with Fabi. It never came up.

I was going to be part of new business division. This was going to be the fourth time Cox was attempting to start up a business division. All the previous attempts had failed.

This time around, Cox was going all out to make the business division a success. They hired Ken, our G.M., who leased the 30th floor of a class A building in downtown San Diego.(1) The lease was $45,000 a month for 5 years. They spent $75,000 to build a display room, to demonstrate the phone, video and internet services.(2) The location was supposed to impress customers and attract the best employees. Everyone was given free parking and free cable.(3)

Fabi, as it turned out, hired a team with a heavy emphasis on looks and personality and little emphasis on ability. We were all single, attractive men with little outside sales experience. Typically, salesmen are attractive but it went a little further than that. One guy, Eric, looked like Brad Pitt but with less sales ability than Brad Pitt. Fabi called us her “dogs” and had us each buy a stuffed animal dog and place it in our work space.

There were seven other sales reps when I started, Dan, Philippe, Thomas, John, Eric, some other guy and some lady(4), I forget their names.

Dan was a stocky, little Filipino guy. He had good command of the language, was well dressed and professional. Dan sounded great in person but sounded completely gay on the phone. The first time I heard him I thought he was talking to a gay guy and was mirroring him. But then he talked the same way on every call.

Philip was a whiny, nasally French guy from Northern California. He was good looking, in a John Davidson from “That’s Incredible”, sort of way. There wasn’t a subject or a situation that Philip couldn’t complain about. He made me seem positive and upbeat.

John used to come into the office grumbling and sullen, disappear for a few minutes and came back singing and smiling. Rumor had it that he used cocaine. If he did, he never offered me any. John could identify any song, after hearing just a few notes, even if someone was humming them. He left a really good job selling auto glass. He was making close to six figures and had a company car.

Eric was the before mentioned good looking guy that needed the Wizard of Oz to give him a brain. Fabi hired him without any telecom and very little sales experience.(5)

Thomas was a big, pudgy guy with a huge head who transferred from inside sales. He was the single worst salesperson I’ve ever worked with. One day I overheard him on the phone talking to a potential customer. From what I could gather the caller was ready to buy but had some questions he needed answered. Thomas couldn’t get the guy off the phone fast enough. He kept saying, “Okay? Okay?” almost like he was irritated. The guy had no clue.

Thomas wrote his own sales letter that he mailed to prospects that resided on Cox’s network. Because Cox didn’t utilize the Phone Company’s local loops, a business had to be on the Cox network to receive service.

Thomas’ letter was his way to let those businesses know they were connected to Cox’s network. It was a bit presumptuous. Imagine a company mailing out a marketing letter that said, “Guess what. You can buy our service!” In Thomas’ letter he wrote: “I want to inform you that your business is serviceable. Yup, that’s right. Cox service is available to your business.”

First, the word “serviceable” didn’t mean anything to anyone outside of Cox. Second, what professional uses the word “yup”? Who types it in a business letter?

On my first day at Cox, we reported to the main office and went through a haphazard training session. It was obvious that nothing was planned ahead of time. Philippe, who was a quick study, was all ready complaining about the products and pricing. That afternoon, we sat through an absurd session on contract folders. We were supposed to use a yellow folder if we sold phone service, red if we sold internet, purple if we sold web hosting and an orange one if you sold a combination of phone and internet. If you made a sale and placed the contract in the wrong color folder, it would be returned to you.

Afterward the folder training we sat around for an hour before Fabi informed us she nothing else and sent us all home.

We dicked around for a couple more days, until the office downtown was ready. The first thing I noticed was that we had about four times more space than we needed. Fabi had a corner office. Hugo, the Build Out Manager had a corner office. The other two corners were for the Customer Service Director and Ken. Before we made one sale we had a Customer Service Manager and Director(6), Inside and Outside Sales Managers, a Sales Director and a General Manager, a Marketing Manager and a Marketing team, an Operations Manager and Director and a Network Build Out Manager. I think there were three customer service representatives and they had a Manager and a Director.

The man making all the decisions was Ken, the G.M. Ken was simply the worst person I’ve ever worked for. I can’t imagine what the people responsible for hiring him were thinking. The first time I met him, he shook my hand violently for a full ten seconds. I felt like I was a bull rider trying to stay on a bull. Afterwards, he advised me to wash my hand because he just gotten over the flu.

Ken used to walk around the office closing the blinds to save electricity. We were on the 30th floor and there were beautiful views in every direction and he wanted the blinds drawn. One time he came over to the sales area and asked for help from someone with muscles. One of the guys told him I worked out. He looked me up and down, in a real creepy way, and told me to follow him. He wanted me to move some potted plants in the lobby. I literally moved them an inch or two and he was thrilled because he thought that made the lobby looked so much better.

Ken waited about two weeks before he expressed his frustration with the sales team. He would come over and ask us questions about something sales related. When we didn’t answer appropriately, he would become agitated, and then go bitch about us to one of the administrative employees.

He would take over our sales meetings. He would ramble on about outdated sales techniques and strategies. Fabi started scheduling our meetings on the fly and held them on the sales floor instead of the conference room, to avoid Ken.

Thomas never should have left inside sales. He was in the residential call center and it was easy pickings over there. They had people working 40 hours a week and making six figures. There was some skill involved but basically all you had to do was stay open for calls, be aggressive and good on the computer. There was no outbound calling and the pricing was very aggressive. Cox was competing with the local phone company for phone service and under cutting their prices. A second line cost five bucks a month when the phone company was charging more than twice that. The residential side was a success because of their low prices and they were the only alternative to the phone company. The business division wanted to charge more than the incumbent and there was a slew of competition.

We were pricing our internet service by number of computers connected to the network. When someone asked me how much are service cost and I asked them how many computers they had networked, they looked at me like funny. We were selling high tech but our pricing system was no tech. Networking had become more sophisticated and routers were being utilized, so there was no way for Cox to know what they were connecting to. If you priced the service the way the company wanted, a company that had ten computers on their network would pay $400 a month, ten times what a residential customer would pay for the same service. Meanwhile, the phone company was selling their high speed service for as little as $29 a month.

Our only hope was to count every other computer and bundle our internet with the phone service. Then we could hide the cost of the Internet. Our phone service was only slightly less than the phone company’s, but if you didn’t quote the taxes and surcharges, prospects would do the math in their heads and think that we offering a better deal. Everything would be fine until they got their first bill.

At first, big, fat Thomas had the inside sales team spoon feeding him leads. He had worked with everybody over there, when they were all in the residential call center. They would send him the stuff that wasn’t automatically serviceable and Thomas would work it though the system. He was the only one us making any sales. He would sit and stare at his computer while the rest of us were busy making cold calls. He never left the office. We would go out and prospect and Thomas would sit in front of his computer. And then, all of a sudden, he’d pull a sale out of his ass. It wasn’t fair and I took it up with Fabi. He was making the rest of us look bad. Fabi went to the inside sales manager and put a stop to it. Fabi was probably willing to do this because Thomas was the least attractive one on the sales team. She probably thought she could replace Thomas with someone more dateable. From that point on, all of the leads from inside sales were distributed evenly. Thomas was done. He kept staring at his computer but never made another sale. He tried to transfer back to residential. He had to quit and get rehired and he lost all his seniority.

(1) If you watch the movie Traffic, Dennis Quaid’s office was one of our conference rooms.

(2) Imagine bringing a customer up to your floor to show him phone service, like it had just been invented.

(3) Including the Playboy channel if you wanted it.

(4) The lady quit right after I started. She quit because Cox was going to establish sales objectives. I guess she had worked there for some time and was never measured. Imagine that.

(5) Think Liam Neeson hiring his secretary in Schindler’s List.

(6) There were three customer service representatives; almost a one to one, employee to manager ratio.