WNTD: “Yes they work here... but...”

What Not To Do: Random horror stories from the trenches.

Sales reps were supposed to document everyone they talked to, and to collect new names too. (“I saw the same people again, and they bought again” was, for a time, not good enough anymore.) Since valid new names were not always easy to get, one enterprising rep got a (paper) employee list and started entering random names into the CRM system.  Management never caught on - they had a perfunctory QA system where someone would occasionally call the company and ask if the contacts entered into the CRM system actually worked there, the answer for this rep was always “Yes he works here” - but they never asked for (or got) the second half - “as a janitor on the weekends”.

The sales rep confessed this to management after he was promoted for excellent sales. And management, to their credit, went to a “Sales Contact Value” method that better helped identify useful people, influencers and buyers.

And the weekend janitor stopped getting weird messages from the replacement sales rep.