Each week, we bring you the most cringe-worthy sales moments from across the web. To submit your sales fail story for consideration, click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).
I don't sell door-to-door anymore (thankfully) but this is a funny one. I always tell my colleagues this story whenever I start a new job. I was selling home security door-to-door. I was talking to this guy on his front porch. He seemed interested and invited me inside to chat. We were sitting in his living room and I was giving him the pitch and the guy just had a look of regret on his face, like he didn't actually want to hear a pitch. I kept going anyway. The guy picked up his phone and pretended to take a phone call. It didn't ring at all, and I could tell the whole thing was fake. He put on a concerned voice and said into the phone, "Oh no that's horrible, I'll be there right away!" The guy tells me his friend was in an accident and is in the hospital and that he has to leave right away. He apologized and rushed me out of the house, then jumped in his car, and drove off. I walked down the street a bit to get back to my car. I was sitting in my car playing on the phone for maybe 5 minutes before I saw the guy pulling back into his driveway. I was just a couple houses down, so I put the car in drive and drove right by his house while he was walking to his front door and rolled down the window and said, "Hope everything is alright, have a great day sir!" He looked me in the eyes and then pretty much ran back into his house. I still don't know why he did all that, he could have just politely asked me to leave.
Anonymous Location withheld
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This isn't necessarily a sales fail pre se, but it's one of the funniest things I’ve seen in my professional career. It's been a pretty tense year at our company, and the CEO has been hounding sales leadership to grow revenue and they've been pushing the reps extra hard. One day, we were going over opportunities during our standing sales pipeline review meeting over Zoom. One of the reps had his turn to go over his opps and he said that he actually had a presentation put together for the meeting.
He started sharing his screen and the first slide of the presentation was titled: "Reasons why I'm quitting today." Everyone was quiet, thinking that it was some kind of a joke, But the guy just got started in a calm tone, "I'm quitting today and just wanted to give a breakdown of the reasons why." He went to the next slide and the first bullet point was "the management team are incompetent *ssholes." Before he could keep going, our sales manager abruptly ended the meeting. The guy dropped the presentation in the Slack general channel right after the meeting and 30 minutes later, he was removed from Slack. We all read the presentation, and it was pretty hilarious. I DM'd him on LinkedIn to tell him that he's an absolute legend for quitting like that. I still work here, but I'm looking for other jobs.
Anonymous Location withheld
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I'm a BDR, so I do a lot of cold outreach. I always try to focus on quality over quantity, so this usually means I'll spend 20-30 minutes per target account to find the right contact, look them up on LinkedIn, Google them for any interviews/quotes, and find their Twitter so that I can try to get a clearer picture in my head about the person and hopefully find a nugget that I can use to personalize the initial cold email. This has worked for me in the past. I've gotten plenty of responses from people impressed with the depth of research I do who book a meeting solely because of that.
Well, a month ago I was researching a prospect. She had recently come back from maternity leave and had posted about it on LinkedIn with a photo of her newborn. I figured that since she was posting about it on social media, it was fair game and something that might get her talking. I wrote her an email that started with "Congrats on the new addition to your family, I hope [Baby's Name] isn't keeping you up all night." She mentioned the baby's name in the LinkedIn post so I thought I'd use it to show her that I had done my research. I fully realize now how creepy this actually was. The woman emailed me back and said "How do you know my baby's name????" I realized she was spooked by the whole thing so I emailed her back, mentioning that I saw it on LinkedIn and apologized if it came off the wrong way. She messaged me back and said "this is incredibly inappropriate, please don't ever contact me again." I'm definitely more careful now when I do prospect research.
Anonymous Location withheld
