$100 Billion Dollars

The company I sell for has a major retail partnership, which helps generate leads for us. Since we finally expanded this relationship with some of their stores in Texas, I am spending the week meeting all of the managers of our partnership stores.

If these stores can produce legitimate leads, it will mean the world to me. It will quite literally mean my days of booking flights, rental cars, cheap hotels, or guilting friends into letting me surf their couch will be far fewer and farther between.

Since my entire background is education, I tend to assume people who are managers and assistant managers are similar to being principals and assistant principals.

Assistant principals can handle 100% of what needs to be taken care of during the day-to-day operations in a school, but they don’t get to make high dollar decisions without the Principal’s stamp of approval.

Of course, I have seen varying degrees of competence in both the principal and assistant principal roles.

But this is the business world, I expect all of these managers and assistant managers to be producers, professionals, and intelligent.

For the most part, this is proving to be the case. However, there have been some exceptions - even more so than I have found in the world of education.

The first store manager I meant looked like a disheveled customer and was wearing no identifying store colors, name tag, or swag at all. He was polite, but I literally could have been talking to anyone who just decided to say they were the manager.

At the very next location, I met an assistant manager. He was dressed more like the cart boy with a worn company sweatshirt and a wool hat. With that said, he was extremely personable, polite, and knowledgeable about the way the program and partnership worked between our two companies.

As I continue to work my way through our partners, they have all since been dressed professionally, wearing company colors or clothing, and are mostly welcoming to have a short conversation with me.

However, a few should never play poker. Their dissatisfaction with being disturbed and having to actually speak with one of their vendors was written clearly across their faces. For some who managed to be polite through their obvious pain, this meant I quickly covered my talking points and got out of their hair.

For others, who were more openly, yet still passive aggressively expressing their displeasure with my visit, I leaned in, got comfortable in their discomfort, and made sure I went over a solid 15-minutes of detail about the program.

My best experience though, was with a hot-shot assistant manager - a know-it-all and big talker. She was out to prove how smart she was, and I have no idea why.

I wasn’t interviewing for a job. I had it. She wasn’t interviewing for a job. She had it.

However, I let her know our companies’ partnership had been mutually beneficial last year. For their lead generations, they receive percentage of our contract price.

To keep this simple, let’s say I told her they receive 10% of the contract price of the job. Let’s also say I told her last year that 10% came out to $1 million for her company.

I was an English teacher. I am open about my lack of math skills, but what happened next caused me to cock my head sideways like a curious animal.

“So, you’re saying your company did $100 billion in sales last year?”

“No. I’m definitely not saying that. That didn’t happen. What makes you think that?”

She then spewed out a bunch of business terminology I did not understand.

“You are a little over my head with those terms. I am not sure why you think we did $100 billion in sales based on our conversation.”

“Well, if we get 10%, and we got $1 million, then your company must have sold $100 billion last year.”

The clouds parted, as I realized I wasn’t missing something. She was absolutely terrible at math.

I politely explained $1 million dollars was not 10% of $100 BILLION. It is only 10% of 10 MILLION.

Poor hotshot was deflated (and rightfully so). Her foot was jammed deep into her mouth. She tried to brush this off and continue to act like top dog, but I was already standing up, smiling with an outreached hand.

This game was over, and I was going out on top.

One. Hundred. BILLION. DOLLARS!!!