It must be the indoctrination I received when I was trained many years ago as a Sales Rep, but I still can't help being flabbergasted by the failure of some organisations to close a sale that's right under their nose. FlabberGAS.
We recently took out one of those maintenance contracts for your heating system (it being essential for life up here in the frozen north). What happens is you spend (virtually) hours listening to bad music via the phone's speaker, and then eventually someone from the gas company wakes you up from whatever else you're doing. They take your order and say they'll send round an inspection engineer. Our first guy went away after 5 minutes, claiming he'd never seen anything like it before (which - if you'd experienced our builders - wouldn't come as a surprise). Some weeks later - last week, after much more bad music - another chap came. He seemed to know what he was doing. So much so that he condemned our (brand new!) system and listed the major installation faults that must urgently be fixed or we'll be speeding across the sea to Fife (and not via the Forth Road Bridge).
Now - I know he wasn't a salesman, but... I mean, Kwik-Fit fitters are not salesmen, but they sure know a potential close when they see one.
What did I want? Did I want the guy to list the faults, report back to HQ, they cancel our contract, refund the last 2 months' payments... ??? (This is what happened.)
Or did I - just maybe - want them to say, "Here's what's wrong, here's an estimate, here's when we can do it." It's not difficult to guess my mind here.
