And now its your fault that it won’t arrive on time and the customer is pissed! They’re on the phone now and want to hear from you why you couldn’t hit your time line.
I worked at a place where it got so bad sales team refused to meet with us because they were pretty certain we were going to beat them up or something.
I don’t think anyone actually threatened violence but there was certainly talk about keying their new flash cars.
Ah well you see, our salesman lied to you, Mr. Customer, he just says insane nonsense that bears no relation to reality in order to get you to give us money. That’s his job. Anyway, when Mr. Salesman gave you a delivery date, he didn’t tell us over here in product assembly about that until about 2 weeks ago, and it’ll take us about 8 weeks to actually make your order quantity.
What’s that? No, no problems here on the assembly line, we actually churned out 15% more widgets last quarter than the quarter before that, and we’re on track for current quarter production numbers to also grow by 15%.
Yep, yep, sorry about that, and that’s a good point, Mr. Salesman may have just added a 0 to those growth figures we reported to him when he was talking with you.
Of course! Thanks for doing business with us! I’ll hand you back over to Mr. Salesman now.
…
Ahem.
Fuck sales.
This is what I would actually say, and this is why I apparently have ‘poor interpersonal skills’.
My favorite saying: “There are two kinds of people you can never trust in this world - salesmen and politicians, and politicians are just salesmen selling that they should be in charge.”
Engineering repeating the same thing over and over to sales. We don’t care how easy you think it is, we’ve never done anything like this, we’ve got no experts or budget for new ones. So yeah its gonna take some time to figure stuff out. And yeah its gonna take actual resources accounting, don’t think you’re off the hook here
Oh my gods I feel this as someone who works in production.
And now its your fault that it won’t arrive on time and the customer is pissed! They’re on the phone now and want to hear from you why you couldn’t hit your time line.
I worked at a place where it got so bad sales team refused to meet with us because they were pretty certain we were going to beat them up or something.
I don’t think anyone actually threatened violence but there was certainly talk about keying their new flash cars.
You gotta laugh at customers who believe sales promises.
Yes hello, who is this?
Oh ok, yes.
Ah well you see, our salesman lied to you, Mr. Customer, he just says insane nonsense that bears no relation to reality in order to get you to give us money. That’s his job. Anyway, when Mr. Salesman gave you a delivery date, he didn’t tell us over here in product assembly about that until about 2 weeks ago, and it’ll take us about 8 weeks to actually make your order quantity.
What’s that? No, no problems here on the assembly line, we actually churned out 15% more widgets last quarter than the quarter before that, and we’re on track for current quarter production numbers to also grow by 15%.
Yep, yep, sorry about that, and that’s a good point, Mr. Salesman may have just added a 0 to those growth figures we reported to him when he was talking with you.
Of course! Thanks for doing business with us! I’ll hand you back over to Mr. Salesman now.
…
Ahem.
Fuck sales.
This is what I would actually say, and this is why I apparently have ‘poor interpersonal skills’.
My favorite saying: “There are two kinds of people you can never trust in this world - salesmen and politicians, and politicians are just salesmen selling that they should be in charge.”
Engineering repeating the same thing over and over to sales. We don’t care how easy you think it is, we’ve never done anything like this, we’ve got no experts or budget for new ones. So yeah its gonna take some time to figure stuff out. And yeah its gonna take actual resources accounting, don’t think you’re off the hook here