Not to be morbid, but salespeople have had essentially ZERO budget to travel to or entertain customers. This is a huge part of the job and we are getting crushed by competition who has better budget to wine and dine customers. Should we assume with the impending layoff that funding will be freed up so that we can actually take customers out now? Wishful thinking? I am sick of sending customers a pair of socks and expecting that to be the thing that builds rapport. Customer first mindset? Okayyyyyyyy
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Spot the commenter that’s never done any selling, only talks to people on social, never in person; and is single.
: how do you want us to compete with people like Palo and Dell and Juniper etc who pony up for huge events like the Kentucky Derby and F1 races for their customers ALL the time.
You compete on the product and its ability to meet a customers need. This is supposed to be about the technology and QUALITY (which Cisco hasn’t had in ages) NOT the limit on your corporate card.
A CFO that allows $100M to be stolen from the company should be fired by the board
The $100M paid for fake expenses would save 500 jobs...
I've heard many go on about how they did the best job possible, working 80 hour weeks and overrunning by years. Not having skills, they don't know that they could have accomplished the same task with 10% of the effort. Cisco can do this because they have obscene margins where they can be both inefficient (severe overruns) and ineffective (severe technical debt.) Companies in low margin businesses are forced to learn how to do the job right with far fewer resources.
More bad bodies working under bad management is not the answer.
The $100M paid for fake expenses would save 500 jobs with average salary of $200K if CEO and CFO did their jobs
20,000 sales reps/sales managers submitting $5K each in bogus expenses = $100M
I bet if you took a customer to a g-y/trans strip club this woke leadership would happily approve whatever expenses you had.
Amazing that sales reps get away with never meeting any customers but still submit expense reports for meals, event tickets, etc that get auto-approved without any manager or auditor reviewing
Sales here… how do you want us to compete with people like Palo and Dell and Juniper etc who pony up for huge events like the Kentucky Derby and F1 races for their customers ALL the time.
Btw, no one on sales wanted to go to GSX.
What we wanted was innovative products to sell.
Want to know why we are having layoffs? Because we have to send socks to our customers. 15 years of sales not once did I ever take a customer to a strip club.
SLT is the problem. Not sales.
Go cry somewhere else.
Hey Sales - you missed plan so badly the CPF is 0.61 - but here's your reward for it: A giant pi-s up in Las Vegas.
Wow sales people are pi---d that they can't expense strip clubs anymore. Who would have thunk?
The reality is that AM's expense fancy dinners and drinks with other AM's all the time with no customers in attendance
🤡🤡
Well with terrible products like we’ve got there’s no other way to trick people into buying
Mo--ns. Would you go on a date to propose to the potential mother of your children but say it has to be MacDonald’s and we need to 50:50? A few hundred bucks to buy a good lunch dinner for a customer is just being polite. We aren’t talking $1K bottles of wine, our eVPs do that between themselves.
This years T&E budget went to pay Maroon 5 at GSX. And anyone betting the sales teams still travel to Hawaii this year to golf with Chuck?
Some orgs are so tight that even the CR budget they are controlling because of optics… this is VP paranoia and if you work for one of them you are in trouble as they are so scared of losing their jobs.
I’m a SE. I have coffees and light lunches with my customers maybe once every three or four months or so. I spend $50 or so for a panini and chips and coffee over working lunches for myself and 3-4 engineers. That’s the cost of doing business, you can’t cut that away, it’s a business politeness. If we did I think we really would be up sh-t creek.
All ciso sales peoples all lying serpents who canot present our solutions!! We need get rid of sellers and bring functional sales to BE. Customer don’t want to talk to seller who lie and make false product promise. They want for talk to engineers!!! We can teach customer how innovative with out SW and platform. All sales do is escalate and creates headaches for us while they cover for lies. Chuck needs to speak with us!! I hope all sales get fired on 16th!!
I don't work in sales (Engineering actually), but I've been around a bit. I can say this may have some merit. Some of the most successful organizations I've seen is when the sales folks and account managers visit with clients and take them out. Obviously there's a difference between cracking open $1,000 bottles of wine and going to Applebee's here...
But even still, the customer can fit the spend. If a client is spending a million dollars a year, cracking open $1,000 bottles of wine is justified. Also, this is important to build relationships. Relationships make the sell...sure the product is nice, support is nice...and those are great things to have, but clients buy from people, not machines.
Also, a lot of times, these second in commands, some associate director at that company finds another job and calls sales for his new employer because you had dinner with him before at a previous company. This type of thing happens very frequently. Do not underestimate the power of a relationship, it is strong and mighty.
All the billions in the world for dividends and stock buybacks.
Gotta love sale's penchant for spending. Wining and dining is a crutch for solutions.
Imagine my surprise when I see Keanu Reeves in a Palo Alto commercial during Monday Night Football. Money well spent. Cisco has... well... I don't know.
Another example of CFO Scott not doing his job with no process in place to audit sales team's expense report abuse which results in more people being LR'd and stockholders footing the bill
Many cases of AM's, RM's, Sales Directors, etc abusing expense rules by taking out family and friends to fancy restaurants on Cisco's dime with some getting caught and fired
Maybe I'm a rarity in this case, but many of my own clients have been facing huge layoffs and turnover in their orgs too and they are now much busier than they used to be. Clients would rather meet and have actionable interactions that bring value.
Taking clients out to wine and dine shouldn't be a big factor for relationship builder. Clients should be getting solutions to their problems and value with each and every interaction. If they can trust that we're listening to them and want to solve their problems, that's how you build a relationship.
Wining and dining isn't what keeps a client after they've been sold something, and Cisco really needs to take a look at the customer lifecycle because the customer experience is awful.