A fictional story, inspired by true events!
“Do you know Adobe?” she asked.
“Yes! I’ve been using Adobe Creative Cloud for years now,”
was my reply.
“What about InDesign?”
“I’ve used it for years. I used it at my previous job to create
manuals, pack-in sheets and pamphlets. As a matter of fact, that portfolio you’re
looking at was made in InDesign.”
“Have you ever done sales?”
“Well… No, but I used to answer the phone at work in an
effort to try to help the salespeople out. I didn’t have access to QuickBooks
or anything to enter orders with or to take money, but I endeavored to be courteous
and to help the customer out as much as I could before sending them to the
sales department.”
“Well, this is directly interacting with customers. You’ve
never done that have you? I mean, would you be willing to do that?”
“Yes, I’d be willing to learn.”
This exchange happened eight weeks before my first (and
last) job in the sales department of a small local newspaper came to a sudden
end.
I should point out that nothing I told my future (and now
former) boss (who I will refer to as “Mary Beth” from this point forward) was a
lie: I have indeed used Adobe Creative Cloud (and specifically InDesign) for
years, and I have never done any sort of sales, and believe it or not, I was
genuinely willing to learn how to sell. But that was my problem, you see: I had
expected to have training, and that was a mistake.
I had been hired to take the place of another employee (let’s
call her “Sally”) who had been with the company for five years. That number was
important, because I was attempting to fill those shoes quickly, and during the
full two-and-a-half days of training (yes, I’m not making that number up) that
I had with that employee, I learned that no one there seemed to know who their
various clients actually were (often referred to in vague references of
business names), that all of their graphic design was done in InDesign, that
any “art” used in the paper was downloaded clip art, and that in 2017, with
clear access to simple and numerous database programs, people still used a pile
of index cards to write sales leads on.
But things really got tough after “Sally” left. I made an
honest effort to track down who the various clients were, only to find out that
much of the contact information I was given was grievously out-of-date, but I
persevered. It was rough trying to go from a constantly up-to-date Adobe
Creative Cloud InDesign on the PC to a horribly redacted version of Adobe
Creative Suite on a Mac, which itself had not had an OS update in years,
resulting in web browsers that no longer worked and weird program glitches that
seemed to happen from time-to-time. It was made all the worse by the fact that “Sally”
never had any formal training with InDesign and had never actually bothered to
learn any best procedures while using it, resulting in files that were far more
difficult to edit than they needed to be. Still, the few ads that I made from
scratch were lauded by my clients, and that felt good.
The great unraveling
I think that I knew the end was coming when one of our
biggest healthcare clients told me that they wanted to, “see what I could do.”
I spent (probably too much time) crafting an ad that used their web page’s colors
to great effect, coordinated fonts to look smooth, and colored text boxes with
indent spacing so that they could be resized on the fly with the text, making
future manipulation better. It looked professional, and I was proud of the job
that I had done. The client wasn’t, and kept asking for revision after
revision, until finally they gave up and said, “we’ll have our people do it
next week,” indicating that I lost the sale for that week. I was crushed by
this. “Mary Beth,” rather than being a supportive boss who could have listened
and been supportive, decided at that moment to basically yell at me that I
should have just done what “Sally” did, and had me look at their previous ad,
which was a mess of colors, mismatched clip art, and about six different fonts
willy-nilly throughout the page. That was when “Mary Beth” decided that the
large clients were too important to entrust to me, and began taking them for
herself.
This, of course, made my job even harder, because now I didn’t
have the large client base that “Sally” previously had. What’s more, “Mary Beth”
hired another salesperson (we’ll call her “Anna”) who was experienced, full of
enthusiasm, and ready to make some sales… Until over the course of three weeks
I watched “Mary Beth” whittle down “Anna’s” enthusiasm to the point the poor
girl was just sick at the thought of coming to work.
Now before we go any further, I want to say that I don’t
entirely blame “Mary Beth.” She is a capable woman, that much is true, having
started several businesses from scratch. That is admirable for a mother of
three with no formal training. The staff at the paper I worked for were great
people, and the loss of “Sally” coupled with next-to-no-training and a steep
learning curve for new employees really affected the cash flow. Because she
suddenly had to take on so many of the responsibilities of her former protégé, she was understandably under a lot of stress.
That didn’t make her any easier to work with.
From this point on, “Mary Beth” would loudly affirm that
everyone should have been making sales calls, that there should be no typing,
just calls calls calls. But here was the reason that it took me so long to make
those calls: I had started my own personal database of contacts, so that I could
record short notes of who I called, what I said to them, and how they
responded. This was important, because even though I was writing it down, “Mary
Beth” would ask me if I had called a client out of the blue, thinking that I
was not, but here’s the other thing: Almost none of the people I called ever
answered their phone, and a fair few even told me to communicate via email
only. Once I started taking these notes, I could look up a conversation in a
matter of moments, rather than having to dig through the archaic paper lists
that she had us using.
What’s more, “Mary Beth” began assigning us clients to call
on, but she herself couldn’t keep a damn thing straight about whose client was
whose, giving sales that I had made previously to the other salespeople. This
culminated in a moment where “Mary Beth” began grilling me on who I was
calling, accusing me of ignoring a client – that she had assigned to the other
salesperson. At this point I almost blew up at her, telling her that her system
wasn’t working, whereupon I was given an angry speech that “it’s worked for
seven years now, there’s nothing wrong with it!” before she dimwittedly gave a
client that I was actively working with to another salesperson not five minutes
later (true story). After about three weeks of “Mary Beth’s” needling abuse, “Anna”
quit, and quite honestly, I envied her… But I’m no quitter!
“It’s worked for seven years now, there’s nothing wrong with it!”
-Mary Beth, right before it didn't work
Selling ads for a weekly free newspaper isn’t easy, despite
what “Mary Beth” would have one believe, but learning it under the gun is even
worse. People (usually small businesses) pay good money to have a small ad put
in the paper for weeks at a time, and very few get any traction from it at all
(believe me, I’ve asked some of the people I’ve sold ads to in the past). When
I worked for the paper, I was put in charge of employment ads, but if the
position is filled they’re not going to advertise again. If they get no
responses from your publication, they’re not likely to advertise again – ever.
Even if a daily paper is expensive to advertise in, they’re more likely to use
it because daily papers are typically delivered to the reader’s door, and not
picked up at random gas stations. Moreover, employers will pay the extra money
for an online option so that they not only get tech-savvy people, but because
getting data from an online form is much easier for a large business to deal
with.
The graphic design wasn’t easy, either. Don’t misconstrue
that: There’s nothing magical or special about creating graphics for a
newspaper, but there’s something difficult about making graphics for a paper
that is run by “Mary Beth,” who would constantly state that “Sally used to make
graphics while she was still on the phone with a client and have it sent over
to them while she was still on the line!” Personally, in the nearly three days
that I spent training under “Sally,” I had never seen her do this, nor noticed
any indication that she ever had. I did once watch her painfully and ploddingly
manually resize the text in the columns of a feature for almost an hour, a feat
that took me about two minutes to do BECAUSE I KNOW HOW TO USE INDESIGN DAMMIT –
sorry, that was uncalled for. I can believe that “Sally” never spent more than a
few minutes with her graphics, however, because trying to make edits to them was
a nightmare of shape layers acting as the backgrounds of text boxes, weird
combinations of fonts, not a single paragraph style anywhere to be found, and a
drunk freshman’s understanding of color theory. To be fair, most of her ads
looked fine, though a few left a lot to be desired (she had obviously honed it with time).
So early in what would become my last week I began calling
in volume. I stayed focused, which wasn’t easy with “Mary Beth” constantly
coming over to tell me that everything I was doing was wrong and that “Sally”
could have done it so much better and faster. “Mary Beth” sold an ad that her
client sent to her in a Microsoft Publisher file, and she couldn’t figure out
how to open it, but I had Publisher on my machine and told her to send it over.
It took me about 10 minutes to create an InDesign file equivalent of the
publisher one in our paper’s format from nearly scratch (it was seriously easy),
but instead I was told that I had taken too long with it. Other little
interruptions like this broke out throughout the week, and I got them all taken
care of quickly, so that I could concentrate on my calls.
Simply using the list of contacts that I had built-up.
Between Tuesday and Thursday, I had made around 70 calls, and sold three small
ads, which wasn’t enough to meet my sales goals for the week. When I came in on
Friday “Mary Beth” was already there, along with the editor-in-chief (I’m
guessing that he was there as backup in case anything happened). She informed
me that “It’s not working out, and I think you know that.”
I packed up my things and left, but before leaving, I told
her, “You want my advice? Get “Sally” back. Double her pay if you have to,
because you are LOST without her.”
My advice to anyone out there, learn to spot a “Mary Beth” before you work for him or her. These people are usually religious (in the
sense of status and ease-of-offense, not necessarily the ‘love your fellow man’
bits) and very embedded in the community. They get where they are by smiling
and sucking up to power, are very passive-aggressive, and in private are the
most miserable people you’ll ever come across. I can’t explain it, really. Let’s
just say that I once saw “Mary Beth” at an event which was fun and exciting,
where she was a participant. If one was to take a photograph of her during this
event with a telephoto lens, she would be glowering and look like the most
bitter and hateful person you’ve ever seen trying to have fun. That is not a fun person to be around, and that is not a good person to work for.
And so my odyssey in sales ends. I’m not unhappy to be rid
of it.
