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Before I got into B2B, I was a car salesman for one of the biggest dealership groups in the Northeast. This was my first taste of sales after being a bartender so I was basically just learning the ropes and what not.
One day, a younger woman came in to look at some cars. She came in by herself but said that her boyfriend was going to meet her shortly. Well, the boyfriend never showed up, so after looking at a few cars and going on a test drive, she gave me her contact info and left the dealership.
Over the next few weeks, she and I texted about pricing and available vehicles. I would occasionally use a smiley face and was pretty conversational and playful because that’s the way she would communicate and we were not that far apart in age. My intentions were to sell a vehicle, and I was in a long-term relationship at the time.
Well, just as I thought we were getting close to her buying a car, I got a text from her phone. It basically went like this: “This is (woman’s name) boyfriend, you piece of shit. You’re going to stop flirting with my fiance or I’m gonna come down there and make you wish you were never born.”
I wanted to respond (and so did my coworkers) but my sales manager talked me out of it and convinced me to let it go. I never saw or heard from the woman again and ended up leaving car sales less than a year later. Still one of the funniest things that’s happened to me in sales.
Anonymous Location withheld
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This happened to me early in my career. I was an AE at a small company providing agency services to startups. I handled the sales and account management for clients. I just landed a new customer, a CEO of a new startup. The first month went great, everyone was happy. I had the client's credit card to run monthly payments for the retainer. The end of the second month came around so I went ahead and charged his credit card like I had the month before. It was business as usual — the invoice was due so I ran the card.
Later that night, around 9pm, I got a call from my client. He was PISSED. Apparently he was out at a business dinner with a big prospective client (he was calling from the bathroom at the restaurant). He went to pay with his card, the same one that I ran earlier that day, and it got declined for hitting the credit limit. He was yelling about how embarrassed he was, how he had to put the whole bill on his personal card, and how unprofessional it was that I didn't let him know I would be charging the card.
I did my best to diffuse the situation and apologized profusely. I talked to my boss in the morning because I was worried he was going to leave, so we agreed to give him 25% off his next bill. He ended up staying with us and the relationship was great from there on but it was still a close call.
Anonymous Location withheld
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After I graduated from college, I was looking for a job. A friend of mine had an older brother who had started an online business reselling tickets to concerts and sporting events, and at the time, it was doing really well. He told me I could come work for him, and I agreed.
We were basically a call center in an office building, where we had a pretty big suite all to ourselves. It was very much a boiler-room-type environment. We were loud, rowdy, and whenever we had a good week, the owner and managers would pay for food and drinks.
One day, these two guys I worked with got into an argument. From what I can remember, they were arguing over a lead that had come in. One guy had already talked to the customer a few days earlier, but the second guy had closed him when he called back, and neither one of the guys was willing to go halves on the deal.
The argument kept getting louder and louder until everyone was basically just watching them instead of working. Then, one of the guys picked up a stapler from his desk and chucked it at the other guy. The other guy dodged it, then immediately got up and lunged at the first guy.
I had never seen anything like it. They were literally having a full-on fistfight in the middle of the office. They tumbled over a desk and were trying to toss each other around while the rest of us basically just watched with our mouths open for fifteen or twenty long seconds.
Finally, a few of the guys broke up the fight. The boss sent both guys home, and made sure they left separately so there wouldn’t be another brawl in the parking lot. But the absolute best part of the story is that neither one of them got fired, and a few days later they were both back at the office as if it had never happened. The company eventually closed but it was definitely my craziest workplace memory of all time.
Anonymous Location withheld
