Sales Calls from Hell

When your demo products don’t work, you mangle your prospect’s name or blood splatters over a surgeon who could make or break your entry into a new market, it may seem as if the game is over. Perhaps you should call it a day and head for the nearest boxing ring, where you could take a real beating. Hold on now.

Yes, it’s tough on the road. And yes, sometimes a sales call can turn into a total disaster. But there’s always the hope that you can still pull off the sale. After all, nobody’s perfect. Even customers make mistakes. You’re allowed to fail – miserably. The key is not in what happened that turned the sale south, but what you did next.

Here are nine sales calls from hell. After reading these true stories of real disasters, you’ll discover how top salespeople salvage deals from situations that have gone impossibly, horribly wrong.

The Exploding Demo

George Ludwig was making the rounds, demo-ing an innovative blood-salvaging device to surgeons. This gizmo sucks in surgically shed blood, separates out the oxygen-carrying red blood cells, and returns them back into the patient. A hotshot cardiovascular surgeon called Ludwig because he wanted to get a closer look at the device in action. So the machine was put to work during an open-heart surgery – and things went down the tubes. The bag of red cells, supposedly collected to be put back into the patient, exploded, spewing blood cells throughout the operating theater. The surgeon’s face was splattered, and he yelled at Ludwig to get the XY%^Z$$ out and never come back. Awful as this event seemed, it was even worse because this surgeon was a real pro, the sort of doc who sets the style in the greater-Chicago route Ludwig was traveling. With this doc badmouthing the device, selling it would be nearly impossible. So Ludwig dug in to research what had gone wrong.

“It definitely wasn’t the device. An assistant to the doctor hadn’t clamped it properly,” he explained. Then Ludwig dug up testimony from other surgeons who were happy customers. It took him six months and mounds of persuasive evidence, but finally the surgeon relented and saw Ludwig again. “He wound up buying three devices from me,” recalls Ludwig who now is a Cary, Illinois-based sales trainer.

Lesson learned: When the demo goes wrong – and this will happen to you – find out why…then keep after the prospect for another chance. People understand mishaps. By maintaining contact long enough and assembling enough new evidence, you will probably get another chance.

The Presentation Sleeper

Pete Toennies and his partner were in clover. They had scored an appointment to demonstrate cutting-edge technology to a senior member of management at a thriving Connecticut firm. This was hot stuff – great technology that no one else had and a prospect who could indeed sign on the dotted line. Toennies started off with a slide presentation and…lights dimmed…minutes into the show a loud snore echoed throughout the conference room. It wasn’t Toennies, it wasn’t his partner, so it had to be the prospect. “At least we knew he wasn’t dead. He was making too much noise for that,” recalls Toennies.

But what could the perplexed rep do? Wake him up – and embarrass this buyer who surely would be red-faced? Slink away in the dark? That would be no way to close a deal.

Toennies gamely continued with his presentation and hoped for the best – that the prospect would wake up. That’s exactly what happened, right as the show was nearing its end, and brilliantly, Toennies saved the day. He told the executive, “Thank you, sir. We’ll do exactly as you suggested and return next week to give our presentation to your senior staff.”

Next week, Toennies returned, put on the show for a larger (and wide-awake) audience and walked out “with one of the biggest orders we had ever won for this technology,” says Toennies, a Massachusetts-based sales consultant.

Lesson learned: Never give up. Give the customer a second chance. Even a sleeping customer can buy – and just might if you don’t make an embarrassing situation worse.

The Smashing Success

Steve Waterhouse was in the parking lot of his prospect – which happened to be IBM – in the market to make a large purchase of exactly the kind of testing services Waterhouse was selling. They had arrived in Waterhouse’s partner’s brand new Jeep Grand Cherokee, and as he got out of the vehicle, Waterhouse casually locked the doors. That was when his partner gasped. The keys were inside the vehicle, as was the sales presentation. This called for some fast thinking.

They whistled for a security guard, who drove over in his pick-up. Waterhouse thought the man might have one of those devices that easily open locked car doors, but no luck. Time was ticking away – they were due to begin presenting in a few minutes. Waterhouse glimpsed a tire iron in the bed of the truck, he grabbed it, and without another thought, he smashed out a window in the Jeep, grabbed the briefcase, and said to his partner, “Let’s go.”

“We went in and made a $1 million sale. Was that worth a $300 window?” asks Maine sales consultant Waterhouse. “Don’t panic when you still have time to do something positive,” says Waterhouse. He and his partner could have stood outside jawboning the issue, throwing blame at each other, waiting a half-hour (or longer) for a locksmith. But that wouldn’t have kept the appointment, which resulted in the sale. Breaking the window got the sales team back on track while they still could make the sale.

Lesson learned: When things go wrong, take decisive action and move on. The worst mistake people make in a crisis is doing nothing at all.

The Big Mouth

Barry Maher was deep into his spiel to a company’s CEO when, suddenly, a framed picture on the man’s desk caught Maher’s eye – so he did what salespeople have long been trained to do – he tried to kick the relationship up a personal notch. “Excuse me, but I have to say your daughter is very beautiful,” said Maher. Dead silence in the room. Finally a throat cleared and the CEO said, “That’s my wife.” Maher could feel the floor giving way beneath him; his eyes desperately searched the room looking for a fast exit. Then he saw it: a ceremonial sword decoratively set on a bookshelf. He dashed for the sword, grabbed it and – very elaborately – pretended to commit hara-kiri. He wound up lying on the floor feigning death. At first there was a tense silence in the room. But then the CEO started laughing. “He wound up buying from me,” recalls Maher, the Helendale, California-based author of No Lie: Truth is the Ultimate Sales Tool (McGraw-Hill Trade, 2003).

“Don’t ever assume. Always ask,” says Maher, who adds that he should have said, “What a lovely woman. May I ask who she is?” That would have opened a personal conversation without the need for Maher to feel like melting into the woodwork.

Lesson learned: Self-deprecating humor is a fast track out of many gaffes. Make fun of yourself, and it’s hard for others to hold a grudge.

The Split Decision

Jacques Werth had just arrived at the HQ of a major computer company. Werth had already convinced them that his product – assembly equipment – was just what they needed. So he was confident as his group got out of its car. Then he dropped his sunglasses on the pavement. He bent over to pick them up and, rip! his pants tore along the seam from the bottom of the fly to the waistband. What to do? Werth calmly reached into the car for his suit jacket, put it on, and proceeded to lead the troops in for their presentation. Two hours later, he led his team out of the meeting room with a major deal in hand. And then Werth had to go to the restroom. “I’d resisted going because I’d have had to get up and expose my rear, and then everyone would have seen my predicament.” That would have taken people’s mind off the sales negotiations and who knows where matters would have ended? But Werth could delay no longer, so he headed to the men’s room with the client’s senior VP of engineering, who of course noticed the torn pants – and who had a good chuckle at Werth’s expense. Why would Werth care? He had the signed contract. He even laughed when, later that day, the executive called him to invite him back to meet other senior managers who “wanted to meet the rep who was so cool under fire – at both ends!” laughs Werth, the Pennsylvania-based author of High Probability Selling (Abba Pub Co, 1997).

Lesson learned: When coffee spills on your shirt, buttons pop off or seams split, don’t get rattled; get focused on the job and control the things you can control.

The Hot Deal

Patti Branco had cajoled and persisted, and finally she’d gotten a whale of a prospect to agree to a lunch date. Even though it was 115 degrees on a summer day in Phoenix, Patti had a big smile on her face as she drove over to pick up her prospect. She was so focused on making the deal that she didn’t notice something very important – her car’s air conditioner was barely functioning. Mainly it was just blowing hot air around. But Patti hadn’t noticed that, so she picked up her prospect and as they drove to a restaurant, they got stuck in heavy traffic. The car was scarcely moving. It was getting hotter and hotter inside. Make-up on the woman prospect’s face began to drip off. By the time they got to the restaurant, “she looked as though she had taken a steam bath with her clothes on,” recalls Branco. Lunch was a tense 15-minute eat-and-run affair and, plainly, this prospect had developed real hostility towards Branco.

To smooth over the heated car ride, back at her office Branco assembled a little gift basket that held a bottle of water, an article that offered tips on coping with Phoenix’s heat, a miniature plastic fan, and a little flowering plant that had an attached note, “Needs Shade.” Branco affixed a profuse apology note and off went the basket. As things turned out, “She became a client of mine and was one for years,” says Branco, now a California-based sales consultant.

Lesson learned: If you goofed, belly up and take the blame. Offer apologies. Mix in pertinent humor. People are forgiving in most cases. Trust in your own instincts and the better nature of your prospects. After all, sales is a people business.

The Sour Stomach

The night before her big presentation, Bette Price went out to dinner with her client. He picked the restaurant, and it definitely did not agree with Price. “The fish I ate was not good. The next morning I went to the presentation feeling sick to my stomach.” Price had been invited to sit in on meetings that ran the whole morning, with her presentation coming late in the morning. It wasn’t long before she had to confide in her host that she would have to make an urgent run to the bathroom.

“As it happens, when I returned I felt much better. When I finally presented, I did just fine.” Well enough, in fact, to collect a large piece of business. “This was very humiliating for me but, strangely, it let me bond with that client in an unusual way. He said he was impressed that I remained professional through it all,” recalls Texas-based Price.

Lesson learned: Be confident enough to confide in your client. When you share your problem, you allow the prospect to see how resilient you are. The prospect can then empathize with you and root for you as you march forward.

The Big Break

It was going to be a big day for Shelle Rose Charvet. She had an appointment with a very hot prospect for the sophisticated human resources profiling tools she sold. This man was a big fish for her, and she was excited. So was her very young son, however, and that same morning, the toddler accidentally knocked over a kitchen bench that thudded, loudly and painfully, on Charvet’s foot. When she looked down, the little toe on her right foot was already swelling and turning black and blue. The pain wasn’t that bad – a few aspirin knocked it down – but Charvet nonetheless had a big problem. She couldn’t get her business shoes on that foot. She mulled the options. She could wear a slipper on the right foot and a business shoe on the other. Or she could wear slippers on both feet. The latter is what she went with.

“I looked like an idiot,” says Charvet. There she was, dressed up in slick business attire from the ankles up, but from the ankles down she was wearing well-worn slippers. Could she postpone this call? No way: “It had been hard enough winning this appointment.” She had to go forward. “I limped into his office, quickly explained what had happened, then went into my presentation. I was in there with him a good 60 minutes, and when I limped out, I had an order. He remained a client of ours for many years,” says Canada-based Charvet.

Charvet explains, “You have to deal with this up front. Clients will notice your problem, so tell them straightaway. I explained what had happened and why I was wearing slippers, and we went on from there.”

Lesson learned: Be brief, but explain your situation. Don’t write a novel in your mind, stick with a one-paragraph story and tell that to the prospect. This moment of explanation should take only a minute or three.

The Set Up

A co-worker told Brendan Tobin that a client was feeling a “little” neglected, so she was passing the account to him. She even set up an appointment with the client, and Tobin went to it, thinking this was a formality. He’d show some interest and everything would be kissy face. Wrong. Five angry people surrounded him at this meeting, and they “unloaded on me in every way possible,” says Tobin. As Tobin soaked it in, two thoughts dawned on him.

First, the client was irate not with Tobin’s employer – in fact they seemed satisfied with the service and products – but with the rep who had dumped the account in his lap. The second thought was that she knew this perfectly well; “She’d sandbagged me,” he says. But he pulled a rabbit out of his hat by saying, “Look, I hear you are unhappy with so-and-so. What if I can promise you’ll never deal with her again?”

Tobin poured on the sincerity, promised the clients continued personal attention, and reassured them that there was no way they would ever deal with the other rep again. He walked out with “an order for another round of business with them,” relates New Jersey-based sales consultant Tobin.

Lesson learned: Don’t jump to the conclusion that irate customers are gone forever. Hear them out, because they just may be telling you exactly what you need to do to keep their business.

So here’s the message. In every one of these cases a situation seemed impossible, but somehow, each sales rep pulled a signed purchase order out of the jaws of defeat. In fact, a disaster just may make it easier to sell. If you don’t buy that, consider what sales consultant Rob Frankel says: “Salespeople often don’t realize that recovering from a disaster is a serendipitous opportunity to let a prospect see how we perform in real time under really tough circumstances. When you can overcome a bad situation, that can win sales.” So who knows? The route to your next big sale may be straight through your next disaster.