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August Bonehead Award

Recently, the board of directors of the trade association I founded (Yellow-Tie International) was faced with a dilemma. We had a wonderful idea to customize our member's name tags by letting each member put his or her company logo on his or her tag.

This way, members could wear their name tags everywhere, instead of at only Yellow-Tie events. Problem was, our vendor simply couldn't customize every single tag without quadrupling the cost.

We resolved the issue by doing some quick math and learning that a minor up-front investment of $2,000 in some equipment would allow us to print the tags ourselves -- giving our members the customized tags they want, while actually saving us a lot of money in the long run (500 customized tags for $2,000 instead of 500 basic tags for $5,000).

So I went I-shopping and found a name tag printer that was perfect for our needs -- they had a great printer at a great packaged price that included almost everything we needed to print 500 tags.

I say almost, because in the very last step of the buying process the sales guy (he is an independent rep, not an employee of the company that manufactured the printer) asked me whether I wanted to buy the USB cable I'd need to connect the printer to my computer.

Let me see. Would I rather actually print name tags or am I more interested in purchasing a $2,000 paper weight?

Yes, I bought the printer and the $8.95 cable I needed to make it work. But no matter how much I love the printer, no one will ever hear how great it is, because I refuse to promote any manufacturer this boneheaded. (Note: I'm not faulting the sales guy. In fact, he and I were laughing about their attitude the whole time.)

Imagine the lost opportunity cost of that decision. As Yellow-Tie provides customized name tags to its next 500 members -- most of them business owners with large networks -- not a single one will ever hear how great the printer is. (I even chose to withhold the company name here just so they wouldn't get any positive exposure at all.)

Gill E. Wagner, Sage of Selling
President of Honest Selling
Founder of the Yellow-Tie International Business Development Association

Stand Your Ground

I'm in the process of a whole-scale telephony, laptop, PDA, CRM system, e-mail, GPS tracking, etc., change, so yesterday, my IT guru (Steve Smith of The M.I.S. Corporation) and I stopped in at the Sprint-Nextel store to see whether their phones and services met my needs.

One of my major show-stopper questions is "Can I transport my land-line phone -- (314) 416-1440 -- to a cell phone and cut my overall bill in half?" (This has been my business phone number since 1996 -- changing it would cause me tremendous transitional pain.)

After window-shopping their phones and brochures, Steve and I headed to the counter to get my questions answered. Upon introducing myself to Chris Schmidt, the communications consultant who was assigned to help me, I gave him my phone number and asked him to see whether they could port it to their service. Chris and I then engaged in the following conversation:

Chris: "First I'll need to run a credit check to see if you qualify. Can I have your drivers license, please?"

Me: "I'm not buying today, I'm just here to get a few questions answered."

Chris: "I still need to run the credit check. Can I see your driver's license?"

At this point, my internal voice said, "You've got to be kidding me." But then it said, "My driver's license number is publicly available. Just give it to him and get on with it."

Chris (after attempting the check): "What's your social security number?"

(I won't share with you the exact words my internal voice SCREAMED, because I don't want my language to offend half the people who read this post.)

Me (quite calmly, considering the high-speed rant my brain just heard): "I'm not giving you my social security number to buy a cell phone."

Chris (somewhat flustered as he turned to a colleague): "He doesn't want to give me his social security number. How do I run a credit check without it?"

Chris' Colleague: "Just enter all zeros."

Chris (after entering all zeros): "You're good to go. No deposits required or anything."

Based on this experience, I have some random thoughts to share:

According to an article on the Michigan state website, "... there is growing evidence that identity theft most frequently occurs at the workplace." (See: http://www.michigan.gov/ag/0,1607,7-164--103001--,00.html.) While the article discusses employers' use of employees' SSNs, I assume this means any time you give your SSN to a business you increase your chances that one of that company's employees might steal it. So never give your SSN to anyone unless you are absolutely convinced it is necessary. (Note: One of the easiest ways to learn whether it is necessary is to simply say "No" and see what happens.)

Sprint-Nextel should get its collective head out of its collective rear when it comes to asking people for their SSNs.

First, they should  drop the credit-check policy completely until I'm ready to buy -- they don't need to know my credit rating to answer a few simple questions.

Second, they obviously don't need an SSN to run their level of credit check, because 000-00-0000 seems to do the trick quite effectively. So why the hell are they exposing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of customers and prospects to possible identity theft by asking for something they don't even need?

Third, if the ramification of not passing their credit check is that you must fork over a deposit, wouldn't it be more customer-focused to give people the choice up front instead of simply asking for everyone's SSNs? Or better yet, why not give people the choice of supplying a credit card number and auto-billing for a month's worth of services up front? After all, if Sprint is big enough to buy Nextel, aren't they big enough to make the billing system changes needed to auto-bill credit cards in advance and auto-cancel customers whose credit cards get rejected?

Opinions vary as to what percentage of people are dishonest (my own experience says its around 4 percent). But with Sprint employing around 60,000 and Nextel employing around 80,000, even at 1 percent, that's 1,400 probable thieves with potential access to a massive number of Social Security Numbers that Sprint-Nextel does not really need to do business.

Finally, whether you're buying or selling, hiring or being hired, helping or asking for help, etc., listen to your internal voice and to the hair it raises on the back of your neck when it screams "STOP!"

Your life experience has created finely tuned instincts that tell you when you're exposed to danger. So the moment you feel the hair on the back of your next stand, let your next action be in support of stopping. After all, you can always take the chance later after you've had the time to more carefully analyze the problem.

And let's all tell Sprint-Nextel to "shove it" when they ask for our SSNs.

New Term For Merriam Webster

salesdrip \'salz-drip\ n 1 : dull or boorish person who engages in promoting and selling goods or services by lying to, bullying, cheating or manipulating prospects; also: sales-clown, -dullard, -dummy, -dunce, -idiot

Gill E. Wagner, Sage of Selling
President of Honest Selling
Founder of the Yellow-Tie International Business Development Association

Unsolicited Ideas Coordinator

Did you know that Anheuser-Busch actually has an employee with the job title of "Unsolicited Ideas Coordinator"?

Evidently, they receive so many ideas they need a full-time employee to coordinate them. Problem is, her job is not to flesh them out to see which ones have merit, but to enforce "the strict policy of not accepting unsolicited ideas from outside the Anheuser-Busch family" -- including the ideas sent in by lifetime customers.

You see, on December 18, 2005, I sent three, top AB executives letters containing an idea for a Super Bowl commercial. (Didn't want anything -- just had a crazy idea and felt like sharing.) Then on June 19, I received a letter from their "idea cop" informing me that, while they "value [me] as a customer," they don't want me sending them ideas.

Let's see. They value my money, but they don't consider me family. And they are so egotistical that they want all ideas to come from their "marketing staff and approved agencies" (actually said that in the letter they sent me).

And company executives wonder why Anheuser-Busch is losing market share.

PS: If you want to see the idea I sent, download the PDF version of the letter I wrote. (Note: The one I actually sent was on my old company letterhead.)

PPS: Anybody know a good beer that is similar to Michelob AmberBock but made by someone other than AB? ;-)

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Gill E. Wagner, Sage of Selling
President of Honest Selling
Founder of the Yellow-Tie International Business Development Association