I was once a barn builder and cattleman with a degree from Harvard. As unusual as that sounds, it was good preparation for my two decades at Apple. There I was part of a revolutionary rethinking of how to get people to willingly change their lives and technology.
Clearly Apple made some great products over the years. Yet it was far from a smooth product pipeline and somewhere in the netherworld between customers and the Apple corporation and its products, one of the greatest sales forces ever seemed to spring up. That group of sales people somehow managed to keep Apple in business with a management team that hardly ever understood its own products much less the people selling them or the customers buying them. The examples are endless as laughter about the flying car marketing campaign that Apple once rolled out.
It was often said that the biggest difference between Apple and the Boy Scouts was that the Boy Scouts had adult leadership. It was also a truism that large customers were fond of saying, “Love their products, but I absolutely hate doing business with them.”
That we did not have adults running the company back in 1984 might have been the company’s greatest strength. There were no employee handbooks and little guidance in how to accomplish anything. Because there were no rules and little help ever from the company, innovation was our only hope.
The first 100 days of the Macintosh when people lined up and paid deposits for products that they might get in a few months were a tiny part of my twenty plus years selling Apple products. Most of my career was spent working with customers even resellers who were so anti-Apple that one or two broke out into a sweat when we showed up. I will never forget the words of a Computerland store manager in Halifax when I showed u and asked if he had a few minutes to meet. His response, “If you’re from Apple, I only have a few minutes.”
Beyond hostile partners and reluctant potential customers that were convinced their careers depended on them rejecting Apple, we were faced with territories that were mind-boggling to normal sales people. In my first Apple territory in Canada which I covered for nearly three years by myself, I had over a dozen resellers, well over one hundred school boards, along with seventeen universities and colleges. Then there were the governments of four provinces. One reseller was a two hour flight by jet in St. John’s, Newfoundland from my office in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Yet I still managed to blow away my numbers and finish as the number two sales representative in the world. Normal sales methods do not return those kind (184% of plan) results.
I never did get to take the SWAT (Sell with Apple Training) course but I did learn how to do everything for myself. When I moved to Apple USA and eventually ended up with universities and colleges in the state of Virginia, I felt like my territory had shrunk. I could actually drive from one end of it to the other in six hours instead of taking a two-hour jet flight. To understand the magic that developed in the Apple sales force, particularly the higher education one, you have to imagine how you would handle being responsible for institutional sales to a couple dozen universities and individual sales to a couple hundred thousand students and you were likely doing it mostly on your own.
Apple invented the higher education computer market and a lot of very smart people had to figure out how to be successful. They were faced with the same problems as me and somehow they figured out that by sharing ideas and supporting each other, they could get more done than by going it alone. The process of new ideas and shared successes generated more successes. The ideas and how to be successful became part of the fabric of a results-oriented group of sales people who believed so much in their own abilities and in their own products that they never saw a challenge that they couldn’t tackle.
To put this in context, the prevalent sales theory in executive offices of the time was that everyone needed Xerox sales training or something similar to it. The theory in those classes was to verbally back your customer into a corner until the easiest thing was to say “yes.” Fortunately, most Apple sales people were immune to formal sales training because it had little or nothing to do with how they sold Macs and built relationships with customers.
Structured selling with trick questions had little to do with the real Apple sales process. Apple sales people sold with so little help and often with continuous unneeded challenges coming from their own company, that most believed that could do almost anything with little or no help other than what they got from their colleagues. If ever a company mastered shooting itself in the foot. It was Apple.
The typical Apple higher education sales person worked out of home office long before it became a trend. If they were lucky, they might share a system engineer with four or five other sales representatives. As is still the case in sales, the best teams were under ten people, including a manager, a system engineer or two and the critically important area associate who in the most teams was likely the only person who knew exactly what was happening at all times. A good manager at Apple spent far too much of his or her time keeping the corporate wolves and bean counters at bay, minimizing paperwork and staying available for high level sales calls while making certain sales people had time to sell.
I had one of the best laughs in a while when a colleague suggested that surely my years at Apple had taught me the value of a centralized corporate calendar. Almost any Apple sales person from the early years would buckle over laughing. Trying to keep a centralized calendar would have required more people than we had selling and people were much more valuable talking to customers. Our area associates were sales people when needed,
The fact that we didn’t operate off a central calendar did not slow us down, it speeded us up. We once did nineteen events across eleven states with up to 350 attendees at each event. The calendar was a list of events on a spreadsheet. They were hugely successful mini-MacWorlds and were imitated the next year at the corporate level.
I was fortunate to carry the sales skills that I learned early in my Apple days to Apple’s reseller world and then to the federal team where my career ended as director of federal sales. I ended up with federal because I kept the last Apple federal rep hidden in my enterprise sales team by continually losing the paperwork to lay him off. Our renewed federal team which started with two sales reps tripled sales year after year for the few years it was in place. We were given the impossible task of selling to the largest technology customer in the world with two sales people and a manager and not enough help to fill all the seats in my Previa van.
There was never a person on the federal team who questioned our role of turning around a market that Apple had given up on after once having over one hundred people successfully covering it. Compaq had more people -over fifty-calling on one Department of the Navy than we ever had. We started with six on the team and eventually grew to twenty-six as our sales grew.
I will always remember that when I came to Virginia Tech as a sales rep covering Virginia higher education that the number of IBM employees on campus was in its fifties. Many people at the University absolutely believed that their jobs depended on being loyal to IBM. Less than ten years later after a concentrated effort from the sales person whom I moved there in 1992 when I became a manager and the sell-imposed move away from the mainframe, Va. Tech became one of Apple’s top accounts. The IBM office building in Roanoke closed.
Only a sales force that operated with different rules could have achieved successes like that time after time. I am proud to have been part of it and to have watched the successful Apple sales people spread their unconventional sales skills throughout other companies. Certainly Apple never appreciated them. Apple only tried to force the ones that didn’t flee the company to conform to a process that destroyed the magic that actually kept Apple alive during its challenging years. Don’t ever believe that the sales people are the least important people in the company.
I still use Macs, there are four running ones in my office. At this point in 2022, I have done over thirty large proposal and reports using Pages. I have the mental scars to prove it. As I upgrade my Macs & iPad (M1 MacMini and I5 MacBook Pro, 4th Generation iPad Pro) hardware over the next few months, I will be sharing comments on the hardware. However, I do plan to make a deeper dive into the magic of the Apple sales force. My suspicion is that it is mostly gone from the company but its history deserves to be recorded.
Enjoyed the trip down memory lane
Posted by: Brenda | September 16, 2022 at 05:17 PM