[MrFantsyPants]

My wife and I owned a small software company, 12 employees. It all fell apart when we hired the wrong sales person. He came to us after reading about our company in the paper (We'd just won a World Summit Award). His references checked out, so we took him on on commission only.

4 months later he'd generated almost $4 million in sales. We dropped everything else and threw our whole company behind the new sales. Then he was arrested while crossing the border. Apparently he was indicted in Massachusetts for fraud, for falsifying millions of dollars of sales.

Turns out there were no sales. The people we spoke to on the phone were actors he'd hired. The pages and pages of functional specs from the customer were all made up. And he'd been to jail twice before for doing the same thing.

Moral of the story: Sales people suck. Always check criminal records as well as references.

[brianlash]

Great story, wrong moral.

For every schmuck like the guy you hired there are 1000 decent salespeople. You ended up with a lemon, but don't let that distort your take on sales in general. As with workers in all trades, plenty suck, but plenty more are honest people.

[tstegart]

If there were no sales, how was he getting paid? I'm assuming there is also a risk management/compensation moral to this story as well. You paid someone a commission before a customer had written a check. If the customer later changes their mind (or in your case, does not exist), you would have to get the money back. Even if they had been legit customers but later changed their mind, getting money back is never a good thing to do. I presume you don't compensate like that anymore.

[MrFantsyPants]

We never actually paid him a cent. We covered some of his expenses. Where it hurt us was in moral, and in internal resources poured into a dead end pit. At least he's facing 40 years in jail, and 5 years on, we've managed just fine.

[tstegart]

Thats good to hear. I'm glad you guys are still going after that.