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As part of a new hire sales group, we got invited to a big team meeting with the management team present there as well.
There was this one odd manager who no one knew what he did at the company, what his role was, he was always at the food court, grabbing a coffee, joking around and just talking to people in the contact center. Nobody had a clue, not even the other managers...
As introductions made their rounds and it was my turn I seized the opportunity to address the elephant in the room. And then I point blank stared at him and asked "what exactly do you do here?" with a curiosity tone
The whole room went silent, with their jaws on the floor and his face turned red and then after a few seconds of pin drop silence he said "we will talk about it after the meeting"
Needless to say the meeting ended abruptly right after... And my sales manager walked over said that was a "CLM move"
I asked what that meant and he said that it was a "Career Limiting Move"
In any case, I ended up leaving the job a few months later but learned a valuable lesson not to make any CLM moves at my next job... LOL
Anonymous Location withheld
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This didn’t happen to me, but to a guy at my company. It’s even funnier if you know this guy, who is kind of unintentionally hilarious. He is very likable but a bit awkward and doesn’t always follow social cues. But somehow he is actually a very good sales rep.
Anyway, what happened was this: he had a sales call scheduled with a pretty big potential client. He had worked pretty hard getting into this account, and this was maybe the third or fourth meeting with some of the higher-up decision makers involved. When it came time for the meeting, he didn’t make it.
Later on, I heard what happened from our sales manager, who told me in secret. Basically, a half hour before the call, the sales rep found a weird looking skin tag on his arm. And he got so fixated on trying to figure out what it was that he completely spaced the meeting because he was online looking stuff up.
Thankfully, the skin thing wasn’t anything serious, but he definitely lost the client because he ghosted them for the meeting. Management didn’t even bother to give him a hard time about it because they thought it was so funny. We are both still at the company.
Anonymous Location withheld
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I’m sure this has happened to other people but when it happened to me, I was extremely surprised. I was texting with a prospect about a car. He had come in in person but hadn’t done a test drive because he said he’d owned the same make and model his whole life and knew what he was buying, he just wanted to get the best deal.
Anyway, we were texting back and forth for a bit, mostly discussing price and options. He made me an offer which was definitely too low, so I responded and politely counter-offered at a more reasonable price. I also added a smiley face to the message, which is something I’ve done a hundred times before and which nobody had ever had a problem with.
Well, he took a while to respond, but when he did, he stated that me using “little cartoons” (his words) was unprofessional and borderline disrespectful. He said he thought he was dealing with a professional but apparently not. Then he said he wanted to speak directly to my manager and would only do business with us if he reached out.
I told my manager about it, who reached out to him and basically played along in order to try to sell the vehicle. But the guy apparently just wanted to negotiate and kept trying to lowball my manager, who is super experienced and saw quickly that this guy was basically full of it. My manager said he thought the emoji thing was just him trying to put himself in an advantageous bargaining position. Well, it didn’t work.
Anonymous Texas
