I got and education today

Today I had to visit a customer to get an application signed. I ended up spending my entire morning on the road with one of my sales reps, Lenny.

Lenny is big motorcycle dude. He kind of reminds me of a pro wrestler. And he's obnoxious as hell. He makes up random songs about everything. "It's the sewage plant! Sewwwwwaaaaaage! Don't take a breath!" Sometimes they're funny. Sometimes they're annoying.

A lot of what Lenny does is annoying, and deliberately so at that. His main sales tactic is to wear customers down by annoying them to the point where they buy from him just to get them out of their offices. I was all ready to just drop off the application and have them fax me a copy when the boss was out of his meeting. Lenny set up camp and annoyed the staff until someone took the application into the owner's room and got it signed for us.

He told me three stories:

1. He visited a job site once with a box of doughnuts. When the customer opened the box, he discovered that there was a bite taken out of every single doughnut. Lenny said, "If you want the whole doughnuts, you're going to have to buy something from me." After the customer placed an order, Lenny pulled another box of doughnuts out of his truck. The doughnuts in that box were untouched.

2. Lenny visited another job site and the customer was on a ladder. The customer asked him to throw a pencil up to him. Lenny broke the pencil in half and told the customer that if he wanted the other half of the pencil, he'd have to place an order. Somehow, this also worked.

3. Lenny walked into a customer's office and starts dancing and humming the Bugs Bunny theme song loudly finishing by belting out "On with the show this is iiiiiiiiitttttt!!!!" The conversation that followed went like this:

Customer: Who the FUCK are you??!?!

Lenny: I'm Lenny from (insert company name)

C: I know that song. What the fuck is that song?

L: It's the theme to Bugs Bunny

C: You're really fucked up!

L: I know. Wanna buy something from me?

Somehow this also worked.

"You always have to do something so they don't forget who you are," he told me.

Lenny's boss also told me that one time when he was with Lenny and a customer, Lenny said, "If you don't start buying from us, I'm going to go get one of those baby pools and sit in it all day in my Spedo doing my Manatee Boy impersonation." And he made a little hand motion to indicate what Manatee Boy looked like.

So, he's entertaining. But he's definitely still annoying. He promised to drop some invoices off at a customer's office and then called me lazy after he tried to pass the buck on to me and I refused to do it. It was out of my way and it was really his responsibility. He's very self absorbed and never seems to listen to anyone else. And he plays dumb a lot to get out of doing things and have others do his work for him.

But it was interesting and entertaining, to say the least.