Salesman Clause

On reflecting on class last week something that sticks in my mind is the personal selling element of integrated marketing communications. Unfortunately I do not have documents I can share to give examples of this phenomenon. His name was Jim, he was a salesman that we began to call Salesman Clause. His way of selling to the client was to say yes. Yes to price reductions, waive requirements, offer any and every additional service we offered all at the price of a basic plan. He was our salesman in the mid-west territories and we would all gather in the administration department when he called in, giving the fantastic news that he had signed another client. A round of applause would ensue, and then the questions would begin. Finance would want to know the specifics of what he had offered, operations would want to know how accurate the information they were going to be getting was going to be, implementation would want to know what kind of ridiculous dates had been put on everything, that the company could never meet. Jim would always respond with an inarticulate answer, the CFO would give him an atta-boy and the conference call would end, on a high note for Jim and the CFO, everyone else scraping the bottom of the barrel. Then the paperwork would start to flow in, contracts that had horrible figures, insane due dates that we could never meet, and files that were so messy it would take a month to wade through the data just to get a simple enrollment file. Decisions had to be made as to what battles we wanted to fight, the CFO was no help because in his eyes Jim could do no wrong. Eventually, Jim decided to move on to a different company, making huge sales, with unachievable promises. Personal selling is a huge aspect of integrated marketing communications, but it has to be done right, within the regulations and rules to be affective.