Lousy Major Account Salespeople are Like Fat Software Applications

Last night my laptop starting chugging – every application was hanging – and a reboot did nothing to remedy the situation.  I opened task manager and it appeared that McAfee virus scan was hogging all the resources, but not doing anything important.  I wasn’t even connected to the internet!

Since I couldn’t prevent it from doing what it was doing, and it was preventing me from doing what I needed to do, I decided to uninstall the McAfee application.  That too was problematic since it wouldn’t uninstall and hung the computer up some more.  Long story short, I wasn’t the only one having this problem and there was plenty of information and help available on line.  But as usual it got me thinking….

The application that didn’t do anything but used up all the resources – how much similarity there is between that and your salesperson who doesn’t effectively qualify his large opportunities? He finds these large opportunities, demands technical people get involved, gets designers involved, brings you in to meet the prospect, gets engineers to invest dozens of hours working up prices and continues to invest his own time in the opportunity – for months!  He ties up much of the company’s resources, at a hefty cost, delays the company’s ability to focus on productive work and the opportunity fails to convert to business.  It’s identical to the lousy software!

Here’s what I need from you:  Provide me with a nickname for that troublesome software application and we’ll use that nickname to refer to the salespeople who slow your company machine down using that name from now on.