When your sales manager threatens your job

Published: Wed, 03/16/22

March 16, 2022

Good morning. While the rest of the country is on Spring Break, sales reps (helpfully reminded by their managers) are counting down the days until the end of Q1. For now, let’s take our minds off that Quota with this Quota, where we’ll tell you the story of stuffed-animal-salesman-extraordinaire Ty Warner, take a look at whether sales reps think they’re on track for bigger paychecks in 2022, and give some advice to a sales rep whose manager is always threatening his job. Let’s do this.

NUMBER OF THE WEEK

94.4

The number of activities the average SDR performs per day, including social, call, voicemail, and email touches.

Source: Sales for Life

SALES ROUNDUP

Here’s what’s happening in the sales world this week

Salesforce may have broken new ground this year when they successfully banned meetings for an entire week in an experimental effort at something called “asynchronous work,” or working in a way that doesn’t require real-time communication. In fact, the experiment proved so successful that the company has already scheduled three more trials this year. About one-third of Salesforce's employees participated in the no-meetings week, and the majority reported higher productivity and less stress. You can read about the experiment here.
A former Michigan car salesman found himself in handcuffs and his face plastered all over the news this week, caught in an elaborate scheme to defraud customers for tens of thousands of dollars while using Covid safety protocols as an excuse for meeting outside the dealership (where he no longer worked). The scheme involved calling customers of his former dealership, and promising to get them out of their leases early for favorable terms, then turning around and reselling the vehicle to someone else. You can read more about the brazen and complicated fraud here.

FEATURE

The Story of Ty Warner, the salesman who made a billion dollars selling stuffed toys

The name Ty Warner may be familiar to anyone who grew up in the 90s, as it's the name that graced the tag of every Beanie Baby they ever snuggled with (or placed on their shelf to gather value). It may also be familiar to anyone who was alive in 2014, when he pled guilty to stashing over $100 million in a Swiss Bank account, though (as expected), he spent zero time in jail.

At his trial, Warner’s lawyer insisted that he is a completely self-made man, but that’s not exactly the full story. Warner secured a job as a salesman at the toy seller Dakin through his father, who also worked there at the time. Warner was a natural salesman (it probably helped that he studied drama in college), making six figures in his first year. He reportedly drove a Rolls Royce to his sales calls, sporting a fur coat and top hat, while carrying a cane. “I figured if I was eccentric looking in Indiana, people would think, What is he selling? Let’s look in his case,” Warner told People Magazine correspondent Joni Blackman in 1996. “Then it was easy to sell.”

Warner cultivated a mysterious persona that made people want to know more about him–those who worked with him said it was born of his overinflated ego, but it seemed to work.

Warner’s career at Dakin came to an unceremonious end when he started selling his own toys to customers. For this, he was immediately fired. In response, he jetted off to Italy for a few years, where, fatefully, he saw a plush toy cat that piqued his interest. He decided he wanted to make his own toy cat–a lifelike one.

Warner came back to the states and launched Ty Inc. in 1986, thanks to a generous bequest from his father, who had passed away three years prior. He started making toy cats that, due to being stuffed with PVC pellets, looked exceedingly lifelike. When he carried the toy under his arm in public, people thought he had a real cat. In 1993, he released the first set of nine Beanie Babies. He priced them at $5 a piece, seemingly a play on the “why not, it’s so cheap” mentality.

The lifelike quality of the toys was Warner’s first stroke of genius. The second was creating deliberate scarcity (he was, after all, a salesman) by selling each type of animal for a short period of time, usually only about six months. Additionally, Warner would only allow each store to have 36 of each animal, creating a frenzy around snagging the last one at your neighborhood toy shop. The rise of eBay created a secondary market for the toys, where $5 Beanie Babies were suddenly pulling in five figures. In 1997, eBay sold over $500 million worth of Beanie Babies, accounting for 6% of their total sales. People even started creating counterfeits.

The deliberate scarcity tactics combined with the collectible nature of the toy made Beanie Babies even more desirable. By now they were less of a toy for kids and more of a collector’s item for adults. By 1998, Ty Inc brought in $1.4 billion. And how did Ty celebrate? By creating a limited edition Beanie Baby for his employees, of course. A USA Weekend poll estimated that at least 64% of Americans had at least one Beanie Baby in their house.

By 1999, Warner made the Forbes 400, and his net worth was estimated to be $5 billion. But the market for his toys was waning, as new crazes like Furbies and Pokemon captured kids’ attention. So he decided to pull one last stunt and tease the retirement of the entire Beanie Baby collection on Millennium Eve. But this time, the public was skeptical, and the move didn’t inflate values on the secondary market. As sales declined by more than 90% in the early 2000s, Warner was forced to infuse the company with his own cash.

Leon Schlossberg, who is determined to open the first Beanie Baby museum with his daughter Sandra, speculates that it wasn’t Beanie Babies themselves that lost popularity, but the traders who lost mojo. “The speculative craze just bottomed out and crashed,” Schlossberg told Business Insider. “We’ve coined a new phrase: it’s the rise and fall of the Beanie Gamblers.”

Although Beanie Babies have begun to recede into the collective memory of America, there are still some schoolchildren who are receiving the toys as thoughtful gifts–the Chicago schools that Ty Warner has been mandated to assist as part of his court-mandated community service. Once a brilliant salesman, Ty Warner is now forever enshrined in business and pop-culture history.

MEME OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram -- Sales Humor

QUIZ

Which famous actress sold swimming pools for a living before her career took off?

A. Jennifer Aniston
B. Courteney Cox
C. Jessica Chastain
D. Sandra Bullock

SALES FAILS

Each week, we bring you the most cringe-worthy sales moments from across the web. To submit your sales fail story for consideration, click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

“This didn’t happen to me, but I worked for a (car) dealership when it happened. One of my coworkers sold a truck to a younger guy who said he’d be paying for it in cash, but he needed to go home and get the money. My coworker (the salesman) was skeptical and thought the guy wouldn’t come back, but a few hours later, he got dropped off at the dealership with a huge wad of cash. I don’t remember exactly how much the truck cost but it was around ten grand or just under (this was a long time ago).

Anyway, the guy pays for the truck, and I see my coworker and the GM in their office looking at the money, and all of it was in these older bills that had been discontinued. But the money was real, and a sale was a sale, so we did the paperwork and the guy left in his new pickup.

A few weeks later, the cops show up at the dealership and ask to talk to the manager. It turned out that this guy (the customer) had stolen a bunch of money from some old man who he had done some repair work for. Apparently, the old man didn’t trust banks and kept a bunch of cash hidden throughout his house. My coworker and manager had to appear as witnesses at this guy’s trial, and from what I remember, he got sent to prison for a long time. Not sure what ever happened to the truck, but it’s one of the crazier stories from my time in sales.”

Anonymous Location withheld

GRAPH OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram Poll -- March 2022

ASK THE QUOTA

Want to submit a question and be featured in our advice column? Click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

Dear Quota Team,

I’ve been in sales since the age of twenty. Since then, I’ve pretty much seen it all and done it all. I’m forty-four now, and am pretty good at dealing with the various ups and downs that come with this business. But there’s something that’s been really bugging me, and I wanted to get an outside opinion on it.

My sales manager is about the same age as me. We actually have a pretty similar background in general. He is an OK guy overall, but I wouldn’t consider him a friend or anything like that.

The problem I have is that he uses the termination of people’s employment as a threat. For example, during team meetings, if our numbers aren’t great, he’ll say something like, “If we can’t step it up, management is gonna look at cutting some of the sales team.” He says it casually during one on ones too, things like, “If you want to keep this job, you have to produce.”

We’ve let some people go before, but I wouldn’t say the turnover here is any higher than anywhere else I’ve worked. It might even be lower. But I’ve worked for probably close to a dozen companies, and not a single sales manager I’ve ever had has used the threat of firing people as frequently as this guy does. Is it just me, or is this really bad management?

Confused in Texas

--

Dear Confused,

Your twenty-four years in sales have served you well, because it’s not just you, it is really bad management. While what your sales manager is saying might not seem like a big deal to some, let’s call out what he’s actually doing: he is holding your ability to feed yourself and your family over your head in order to get you to do what he wants you to do.

Now, it’s impossible to know what’s going on inside his head. He might not be a malicious person, and might just be saying this stuff because he doesn’t know any better. But there’s no doubt that what he’s saying is wrong, immature, and an example of bad leadership.

So, now that we agree that what he’s doing is bad, the question becomes: what should you do about it? If it bothers you as much as you say, you could pull him aside the next time he says it and politely explain how you feel (definitely don’t call him out in front of the rest of the sales team). The other option is to just ignore it and chalk it up as the cost of working for your employer.

But no matter what you choose to do, you can be sure that your manager is in the wrong. Good leaders inspire, they don’t threaten or blackmail. And if your manager happens to be a subscriber (feel free to send him a link), then maybe you won’t have to worry about this happening ever again.

Quiz Answer: B – you can read the story here.

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Today's email was written by Ken Kupchik, Erica Furgiuele, Steve Rado, and Emily Hill.

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