What vehicle do you drive?

Cad said:

Any salesman.

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HEY NOW! As someone who works in sales I have to step in here and say, in the most assertive manner possible....

Burns said:

Nah, the drug company sales girl force pays for themselves, 100 times over.

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My industry (Cybersecurity) has been having cascading catastrophe of realizations about middle men.
Traditionally the model was :
Vendor --> Distributor (3-5% markup) --> Reseller (~15% markup) --> Customer

• Vendors made the things...
• Distributors had shipping and distribution logistics to get things from manufacturers to warehouse to customers
• Resellers held business process contracts with the customers so vendors didn't have to do legalese and red line dancing with every customer for business agreements.

Now, almost all cybersecurity gear is all software or SaaS. What exactly do you ship to customers? So suddenly people started asking why exactly we needed "distributors"....
Then the cloud providers all had to have direct contracts with customers (AWS/Azure/GCP/Oracle/etc).. And then they started saying "Since we also already buy from all the cybersecurity vendors, you can do your purchase of their stuff on our paper through our marketplace... and we'll only charge a 3% markup total."
Then a company I will not name started selling "vendor management training" where they exposed the whole market structure and markup levels to enterprise customers....
Now every customer wants to either buy direct, or buy over their existing cloud services contract(taking the place of the disti), saving them usually 15%+ on their purchases. Because they don't think resellers should make 15% for the privilege of the deal being done "on their paper"

I used to work in the reseller space, I now fear for my friends who still do. I work in the vendor space now.

Burns said:

I agree, but that wasn't the conversation! Car salesmen in the dealer network don't benefit the manufacturer or the consumer. They are a pure middlemen. The original post complained that salesmen are useless. Sales has never been to the benefit of the consumer so they are irrelevant when talking about salesmen. The drug sales girls are the most valuable sales force in the country for the manufacturers and stockholders, meaning they are far from useless.

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I sold cars for a couple of years as my day job during the week after I changed direction from Law Enforcement, and it was a great learning experience. I was pretty good at it and worked at a couple of dealerships, selling Fords, BMWs, Pontiac/GMC, and used. There were good sales and bad sales but it all kind of ended for me when I sold a car to a young couple, we got along great, they just bought the car at sticker and we made money on their trade-in. Everyone in the whole salesfloor congratulated me on the deal, which was a huge winner for the dealership but I felt like I had just licked an ashtray. These people had come in, trusted and liked me, and I liked them, and because of that trust and affection spent thousands more than the previous guy I had sold to, who was a total raving jerk and never stopped bitching for hours.

I quit the next day after discussing with my wife. I would rather not eat than feel that way about earning money again. I legit felt dirty, like I was stealing. Every salesperson had a cope for it but your job is to make people like you so they feel better about being manipulated into spending more money for the same car. My weekend job was running security at a nightclub and I felt way better about beating people up for living than I did about snookering them into paying more for cars that assholes were getting better deals on.