American View: What’s the Point of Turning Sales Experiences into Written Narratives?

Management30 Jul 2024

We’re doing our kids a disservice by portraying the world of “big business” as this hyper-efficient, highly skilled, laser-focused realm of dramatic success. I understand why this myth is so desirable; describing our white-collar entities in such a fashion sustains the myth that the adult world is always functioning at its highest potential. Every tech worker is a world-class hacker! Every executive is a charismatic mastermind! Every corporate attorney is a litigation expert! It’s the sort of world that every new college grad yearns to live in.

This is the same artistic drive that inspires script writers to portray every military environment as a superhuman elite special forces command; environments where even the lowest trainee is so highly skilled that they can fly an attack helicopter. Every soldier is a Green Beret! Every sailor is a SEAL! Every photocopier operator in the Pentagon is coincidentally an Olympic class sniper!

So, yeah. Of course every new university grad wants to join the Best of the Best© … They crave the sense of purpose and fulfilment that surely comes from being part of an elite force. Except … it’s not any such thing and it never has been. In truth, it’s painful to watch a new hire’s dreams die once they realize that the Real World™ is consistently 3/5th farce to 2/5th existential despair. No matter where you work, big business is often a poorly run circus where – to quote Mikey Neumann – nobody knows what they’re doing! Adult life is usually more frustrating than fulfilling.

This all came to mind last week. My wife called me from her job to share the newest changes that her shop’s HQ had made to her team’s sales protocols. This was the culmination of weeks of “exciting new thinking” HQ had published on how to run a retail business. Rumours circulated at shop level that the boffins at HQ had hired an outside hip‘n’trendy consulting company to breathe new life into their declining sales metrics. Hence, the random announcement of “cool and edgy” new techniques.

First, the “experts” had patiently explained that the “secret” to greater profitability was … get this! … up-selling!TM *GASP!* SHOOOOCK! Who would’ve ever thought of selling a customer a second thing during their visit?!? The seasoned retail vets in the shops collectively rolled their eyes so hard at this “revelation” that the Earth lost three seconds off earth’s standard rotation speed.

My darling wife has perfected the exasperated eyeroll response. Understandable after putting up with my nonsense for so many years.

A few weeks later, HQ dropped their next bombshell initiative: they’d scientifically classified the different tiers of up-selling! For example, a Class A sale was when a salesclerk convinced their customer to buy something directly related to their original intended purpose. For example, if a customer wanted a fishing rod, selling them fishhooks would be a Class A add-on. See above, re: SHOOOOCK.

Meanwhile, a Class B up-sell happened when the salesclerk convinced their customer to buy something not directly related to their original intended purpose! In this case, the customer bought a fishing rod and was convinced to buy a stethoscope as well. Is this “new” system completely blowing your mind? Let’s hope so since it probably cost the company tens of thousands of pounds in consulting fees …

I wondered what the deal was with abstractly “classifying” sales. My wife learned why a few days later when her HQ’s boffins announced that every up-sell experience must be documented and reported to the head office. It wasn’t enough for the salesclerks to sell more stuff (the ostensible point of all the “improvements”). No! They now had to prove that they were up-selling by annotating the specific class of up-selling they’d accomplished on physical copies of every receipt with hand-written notes about what items were the original purchase versus which were the Class A and Class B sales. These, then, had to be submitted to HQ for review and analysis … or something.

This mandatory “improvement” to the normal sales process was – obviously! – a big pain in the next for everyone. Sales took longer. Customers had to wait, annoyed, while the salesclerks completed their mandatory paperwork. Meanwhile, the sales metrics stubbornly refused to budge. After all, the salesclerks were still up-selling just as they always had. No one was selling more.

My wife told me her team hoped the “annotated receipt” task would die under its own weight after a few weeks. It didn’t. Instead, it got worse … because of course it did. When my wife and her co-workers called me last week to share the latest “killer idea” from HQ, I was legit stunned. Here’s how they phrased it:

“Remember [all the prior new sales protocols]?,” they said, “Well, now we’re required to write a complete story about what happened, then staple the annotated receipt to the finished original document and send it all up to HQ at the end of each workday. We’ve been ordered to craft a complete and original narrative for each sales experience, then handwrite or type it up, assemble the package, and up-channel it.”

You’d think, then, that all the salesclerks would get a stipend to hang out in coffee shops and refine their “I’m a professional writer” look.

She let this sink in, waited for me to stop sputtering, then gleefully announced: “It’s finally happened … We’re doing Agile for Retail!”

That’s a real thing, by the way … so-called (big-A) “Agile retail” supposedly focuses on leveraging “big data” to make smarter decisions (or so I’ve read). Notice that operational definition doesn’t mention anything about addressing human sales techniques. So why did my wife say what she said? Because she’s been listening to me kvetch for years about how businesspeople don’t understand Modern Management Methodologies (abbreviated M3) and thereby inevitably confuse the supporting rituals of their methodology with the real causal factors that make the methodology valuable.

If you’ve ever had a boss demand that all chairs be removed from their conference room so everyone would be forced to stand instead of sit during a meeting, that’s a textbook example of missing the fundamental point of a process. This is something I call Methods Minus Meaning (also abbreviated M3, what a coincidence!). In big-A Agile, a “stand-up meeting” has a specific operational purpose; the standing part of a “stand-up meeting” is an enhancement intended to support the real goal … and nothing more. As the folks at Atlassian explained:

“The daily stand-up is a short, daily meeting to discuss progress and identify blockers. The reason it’s called a ‘stand-up’ is because if attendees participate while standing, the meeting should be kept short.”

The standing part motivates the participants to be succinct and efficient. Get to the point, then get out so the meeting stays on topic and ends promptly. That’s all. Once your workers learn how to keep meetings short and useful, everyone can go back to sitting. The important part of the event is to “discuss progress and identify blockers,” not to build leg strength.

When your performance goals can be better served by paying for your employees’ gym membership than by attending your meetings, you’ve completely lost the plot.

People being people, far too many managers get that concept [bleep] backwards. I’ve been a dozens of managerial meetings over the years where a boss conducted their stock-standard, un-Agile, departmental meeting while forcing everyone to stand around awkwardly … sometimes for hours. The prohibition on sitting made it difficult for the participants to juggle their notes and supporting documents while the boss rambled without an agenda, resulting in a net-decline in productivity. Methods Minus Meaning at its finest.

That’s what I perceive happening in my wife’s retail job. Her bosses’ new requirement to report every sale in the form of a complete narrative sounds – to me – like some clever consultant read about Agile stories and epics from the software development version of big-A and decided that it was the “complete narrative” method that somehow delivers success, not the principle of documenting requirements in a clear and complete format that the narrative method supports.

Realistically, there’s zero value gained by requiring salesclerks document their transactions in the writing style of a dime novel. Who gains what from that? If my wife’s HQ’s objective is to sell more stuff, then the best ways to achieve that are – in order – to send their stores better/more desirable products, to make their prices competitive, and to learn from customer feedback. That’s Sales 101. Collecting reams of what is, essentially, retail fanfic isn’t going to change any of the conditions in their stores or improve their customer experience. It’s just Methods Minus Meaning, forced onto workers in a demoralising and obviously pointless chore.

Just for fun, I penned a “sales story” for my wife in the form of a 1980s romance paperback … and double-dared her to submit it to HQ. She wisely told me to [bleep] off. She knows that she can’t do anything about the pointless new up-selling mandate – nobody at HQ listens to the line staff – but she can keep her head down and wait for the latest stupid idea to blow over. Eventually.

That’s real business life for you. Very little “elite geniuses solving monumental challenges.” Instead, it’s scads of “powerless folks struggling to endure the bloody stupid ideas foisted onto them by £500/hour consultants.” Adult reality is, on its best day, kinda disappointing. There are no “elite” players out there … just normal people doing the best they can in an irrational and inefficient world.