(clipped)



Hold your horses Capt. I don't think you can use such a broad brush to
make
such a claim. There are unethical salesmen in all sorts of fields,
including boats. However, their actions do not necessarily reflect on
the
company they work for unless the company is aware of and condones those
actions.
(next post)

In the automobile business, I supervised new and used car sales crews
for many years.
While its possible to sell a ton of stuff while conducting business
honestly, not enough people who are attracted to careers in the auto
industry have the skills to do so. Those who do, go very far. In a
dealership selling a couple of thosand cars a year, we probably had
somebody hollering "fraud!", or what not, about once a month. There
were cases where the customer was, frankly, either lying or wrong-
(sometimes thought they discovered what looked like a better deal after
taking delivery of a car from us and would be willing to say or do
*anything* to unwind their decision and go save, they thought, a couple
of hundred bucks somewhere else). There were other cases where the
customer
was right, and one salesperson or another said or did something that
was either careless, misinformed, or deliberately dishonest. Even when
you run a strong "desk" system, as I always did, things will sometimes
be said in the privacy of the closing booth that aren't even similar to
what the salesperson was instructed to say.

If the customer had a valid claim because the salesperson did something
that was careless or misinformed, we'd make things right with the
customer, counsel or train the salesperson, and tell the salesperson
that repeating the exact same mistake could result in termination.

If the customer had a valid claim because the salesperson did something
that was intentionally dishonest, we'd make things right with the
customer and then go to the parts department to find an empty cardboard
box to hand to the culprit. We'd give the salesperson about five
minutes to empty his or her desk, turn in the keys to their demo, and
be waiting at the curb for the next city bus to haul their shameful
butt away.
You can change careless behavior, train the misinformed, but you can't
normally turn somebody around who thinks its easier to lie and steal
for a living than it is to sell.



I would not torpedo MarineMax based on a couple of bad transactions,
especially considering they are one of the largest boat dealers in the
world.


When you need to hire a lot of salespeople, a few bad apples will
accidentally slip into the barrel. The difference between a top flight
organization and a House of Sleeze isn't whether one could discover a
bad apple working the floor- but what sort of action the dealership
takes when the bad apple makes him or herself known by actions and
statements. Too many guys take the short view and say, "But he was the
top producer last quarter!". The fact is that most of the people he
*didn't sell* (which will be the majority of customer contacts for
nearly everybody) probably walked out of the place with a negative
impression of a salesperson that seemed far too eager and slick. If
management were able to measure the amount of future business that the
wrong sort of salesperson actually *costs* them and subtract that from
the amount of business he somehow managed to bully or grease into
place, they wouldn't keep him on for 15 minutes.

Like I said up thread, there was a proper and ethical way to sell this
boat. If the buyer was fully informed about the damages to the boat
(and allowed or encouraged to have his own surveyor check out the work
and render an expert opinion) and if the buyer then agreed to proceed
with the transaction, the seller did everything the seller could
possibly have done. The responsibility for making the purchase, *if
fully informed and not deliberately deceived* becomes the buyer's.

While we know which way the judge ruled, we don't really know how the
sales process went. I can say from experience that when an auto or boat
dealer goes to court he or she steps up to the plate with two strikes
already called (especially if an emotional jury is involved) and needs
to realize that in the eyes of the human beings applying the law he or
she is "guilty, unless proven innocent, and if proven innocent there
must have been a miscarriage of justice." :-)

After 28 years in major appliance sales, I couldn't agree with you more. I
wish some of our sales managers had been like you. I can't tell you how
many times they held up to us as an example "their" top producer who the
rest of the staff knew was was not above board in his/her transactions.
Usually, within a month of the bragging, they would find out that the star
salesman was not only cheating customers but usually cheating the company,
also. He/She would disappear and management would never mention their name
again. It never did any good to point out the salesperson's digressions as
management usually took it as "sour grapes" because we didn't have the
"numbers" they were getting from the star. I can honestly say, however,
that the bad people were a small minority and usually didn't last long.

Tom G.