Sep 11th, 2015 - Category: Sales
It has always been surprising to me how many times I eventually “get the rest of the story.” Why was that terrible (or great) business decision made? Why did that customer buy (or not buy) that major system? Why did so and so leave (or join) a certain company? In many cases, I have eventually met somebody (or read something) who clearly explained what was incomprehensible to me at the time.
Almost a year ago, I published the post “Amazon Plays with Fire and Finally Gets Burned.” It was clear even then that the Fire Phone was a flop, but it took quite a while for the rest of the story to come to light and last week Amazon withdrew from the mobile phone market. The GeekWire article “Amazon finally stops selling the Fire Phone” has the details if you are interested, but to me the more interesting part of the story is the fact that according to TheVerge, “Jeff Bezos reportedly approved ‘even the very smallest decisions’ on the Fire Phone.” As the CEO of Amazon and owner of Blue Origin and Washington Post, Bezos is no dummy. So what happened? The short answer is that he had an obsessive attachment to his flawed idea and carried it to the point where people gave up trying to help him. “By the end, the team had given up building a phone for consumers and shifted building one that would satisfy Bezos’s ambitions.” I have seen this happen to many managers (and salespeople) who follow their egos to the exclusion of common sense.
To go back even farther, it took two years to come across a follow-up to my post ”Long Read: Observations From A Tipless Restaurant” which described a restaurant owner’s experience eliminating tips from his San Diego restaurant. Porter rightly concluded that his employees loved it and his customers hated it. It caught my attention because the idea of eliminating commissions in certain high tech sales environments has been discussed at length in this blog in the “Sales” category. Now the topic is current again as the NY Times explains in the article “As Minimum Wages Rise, Restaurants Say No to Tips, Yes to Higher Prices.” Interestingly, they ended the article with the same conclusion that Porter came to: “The No. 1 complaint from customers? The prohibition on tips.” So what did one restaurant do? They added a line to the credit card receipt, “If you INSIST on leaving a tip, write it here.” Maybe there is a clue here for eliminating commissions for specific groups of high tech salespeople, but that’s a topic for a future post. Have a great weekend.