The Job (2 page)

Strictly speaking, I don’t have to sell a single page of advertising-though I do get involved when a guy like Don Dowling refuses to play ball with one of my reps. My job is to be the strategizer. I’m the coach, they’re the players. I coordinate all the campaigns we run; I monitor the advances of my sales team. I encourage, galvanize, threaten. Because if they don’t hit their quotas, then I take an even bieeer hit. And I’m not just talking about set tine my ear bent by Chuck Zanussi-I’m also talking about a financial hit, since my bonus is pegged to how much business my division brings in. My salary is a basic sixty thousand a year-near-poverty-line executive wages in New York. If my team scales that $29.4-million mountain, then I’m due another sixty at the end of the year (the members of the sales force also receive incentive bonuses for every dollar of business they bring in). However, if we achieve less than the designated annual quota, then the bonus figure shrinks accordingly.

But ever since I took over as regional sales manager eighteen months ago, we’ve yet to have a quota shortfall. And when the Christmas bonuses are handed out Friday, December 12 (a date I starred in my diary), I fully expect to see the words SIXTY THOUSAND DOLLARS written across the check… which will help me sleep better, as I’m currently living on hot air. I owe something like $20,000 on my five credit cards. I’m clocking up $325 a month interest on a $25,000 bridge loan I took out five months ago. I’m now a month overdue on my annual $795 membership at the New York Health and Racquet Club. I’ve just booked us on a seven-day Christmas-week package to the Four Seasons Hotel in Nevis (a staggering $5,600 for room and airfare only-but, as I keep telling Lizzie, it’s the first vacation we’ve had in three years). And Barney Gordon, D.D.S.” informed me last week that I’m looking at $3,200 to replace an old bridge that has finally overstayed its welcome after twenty-one years (the result of a bicycle accident at the age of eleven, which cost me my upper front tooth). Unfortunately, bridge work isn’t covered under the company medical plan. And though three grand plus in dental work is, financially speaking, about the last thing I need right now, Doc Gordon says I have no choice but to get the new bridge (the old one is so dangerously loose it’s bound to pop out at any moment-like in the middle of a Lutece lunch with Don Dowling).

In other words, I’m going to see little change from that sixty-grand bonus check. But at least I’ll be in the clear for the first time in three years. And my one big New Year’s resolution for 1998 is: Never get your ass in such a bad financial position again.

The phone on my desk buzzed. I looked up from my list of the day’s accomplishments and hit the speaker button.

“Ned Allen here.”

“How much money you make for me today, Allen?” It was my boss, Chuck Zanussi.

“Plenty, but I’ve blown it all.”

“Oh yeah? On what?”

“Life’s little essentials: a new Ferrari, a Learjet, courtside season tickets for the Knicks…”

“Do I get one of the tickets?” Chuck asked.

“I thought you were a Nets fan.”

“You know, some bosses would fire you for that comment.”

“But you’ve got a great sense of humor, Chuck.”

“You need one in this business.” He dropped the bantering tone.

“So tell me…”

The line began to crackle.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Midair between Chicago and La Guardia.”

“I didn’t know you were hitting Chicago today. I thought you were flying straight back from Seattle.”

“So did I-until I got a call asking me to stop by Chicago …”

“A call from whom?”

“We’ll get to that. So tell me-” “I think I might have finally convinced that Big Buddha, Don Dowling, to come to the table.”

“Anything firm?”

“A single-pager for April.”

“That’s it?”

“But he’s willing to do lunch the week after next.”

“Guess that’s something.”

“It’s more than something, Chuck. It’s a real breakthrough. Ad-Tel’s been dodging us ever since Dowling stepped into the job eight months ago. And Ivan’s been chasing him like hell.”

“But you closed it-not Ivan.”

“Ivan’s all right.”

“He’s worrying me. He hasn’t scored anything in months.”

“Two months, that’s all.”

“That’s long enough,” Chuck said.

“We’re still hitting the quota.”

“Only because everyone else is covering for him.”

“Ivan’s been a winner before, he’ll be a winner again. And he’s on the verge of closing a big spread with GBS….”

“I’ll believe it when I see the ink on the contract.”

“Come on, you know what the guy’s been through….”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“I love a compassionate publisher.”

“I covered his ass when he went through a cold streak like this two years ago.”

“And he pulled through then. Even surpassed his quota by twenty-two percent. The guy’s going to pull through again.”

“I’m touched by your faith in humanity, Ned. It’s so fucking uplifting.”

“So why the side trip to Chicago?”

“Tomorrow.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow. At breakfast. Eight A.M.” the Waldorf.”

“Something up?”

“Tomorrow.”

“So something is up?”

“Maybe.”

“What d’you mean, maybe?”

“Maybe means maybe, that’s all.”

“It’s bad, right?”

“Ned, we’ll deal with this-” “It’s got to be bad.”

“It’s not bad.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s… interesting.”

“Oh, great.”

“All will be revealed at breakfast. Be there.”

I put down the phone. I drummed my fingers on my desk. I chewed my lower lip. I craved a cigarette-and regretted having kicked the habit six months earlier. Interesting. I didn’t like the sound of that. It could only mean one thing: change. And change-especially in a big multinational organization like this one-was usually a synonym for trouble.

You see, CompuWorld is just one of a dozen international titles owned by the Getz-Braun Group. They’re an American-founded company who owns a string of audio, video, and computer magazines in Germany, the U.K.. France, and Japan, as well as the U.S.

They also have a very successful division that plans and runs major computer trade shows around the globe. It’s a lean, no-frills multinational-and intensely corporate. Once you join the “Getz-Braun Family,” you’re a protected member of the organization as long as you’re a “producer.”

“Let me give you the official and the unofficial schtick about Getz-Braun,” Chuck Zanussi said during my job interview in 1993. “The official line is this: You’re joining one of the most lucrative publishing companies in the world. You want to know how lucrative? Get this: Thirteen months ago, Bear-Steams purchased the entire worldwide organization for one point seven billion, then, seven months later, sold it to our current Japanese owners, Yokimura, for two point three billion. Not a bad chunk of change for half a year’s interim ownership.

“Now the unofficial line on this place, the way you either survive or die here comes down to two simple questions: Can you conform, and can you perform? You might be a loose cannon when it comes to schmoozing customers, but around the office you’ve got to be a team player. If you start playing ‘my dick’s bigger than yours,” you’ll be out the door before you have time to zip up your fly. Point two: As long as you keep making the company money, your ass is secure. It all comes down to productivity and whether you can keep hitting the quota month after month.”

Ever since I joined CompuWorld, I’ve always hit the quota-and have been rewarded with steady promotions through the ranks. Hell, during my first two years in Telesales, I was the magazine’s number-one rainmaker, bringing in 18 percent more business than any other sales rep. And since being named a regional sales manager, my team had consistently out paced all other regional divisions when it comes to generating advertising revenue.

So why should things suddenly be … interesting? And why was Chuck-Mr. Shoot from the Hip-being so goddamn cryptic about what went down in Chicago?

I stood up and looked through the glass walls of my office. It’s not really an office-more of an eight-by-eight cubicle stuck in the rear of a charm less white brick 1960s office building on Third Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. At least I have a window, which affords me a panoramic view of a grimy transient hotel on Lexington Avenue (the sort of down-at-the-heels joint that attracts package tourists from eastern Europe). Through the glass walls of my office, I can keep an eye on the action: a tiny rabbit warren of cubicles, in which my Telesales people remain umbilically attached to the telephone for the prescribed eight hours a day. Except, of course, for the office achiever, Debbie Suarez, who was, as always, still there after 7:00 P.M.” jabbering a mile a minute into her headset as she hustled some poor unsuspecting schmuck who’d made the mistake of letting her unleash her sales pitch.

Around CompuWorld, Debbie’s known as “Tommy Gun” Suarez because of her ability to talk faster than anyone else on the planet. She’s also a spy extraordinaire, who knows everything there is to know about everyone at the magazine. The fact that she’s the size of a kewpie doll-around four foot ten, short, dark curly hair, big green eyes, the build of a flyweight boxer-makes her Niagara of words even more startling.

As I left my office and approached her cubicle, I could hear her going at full throttle.

“I know I know I know I know, but loo kit where do you think you gonna find a better outlet? Nah nah nah nah. They tell you that but then you end up with nothin’. And I’m talkin’ nothin’ nothin’. You think I’m telling you all this seven P.M. on a Tuesday night-I could be home with my kid-if I didn’t think I could do something for you? Whadda I mean, do something? Six quarter-pagers for six months. I can give you the deal of the week. Fifty-two five. Sure sure sure, it’s thirty-five a page. A full page. But quarters are ten a pop. Why? You ask why? Get outta here-you know why. No quarter-pagers are ever, ever one fourth the price of a full page. You’re always gonna pay ten percent more … except right now, where I’m offering you six quarters for exactly what you’re asking. That’s eight seventy-five per issue-and you’re saving… hey, you’re fast with the calculations. But now hit ‘times six’ on that calculator of yours. That’s right, we’re talking seven-five you still got in your pocket. I mean, is that a discount or what? Yeah, yeah, yeah, ‘course we give you final approval on position. But loo kit this isn’t an offer you can sleep on. I’ve got three other standbys for that page…. You what? I give you a promise, it’s a promise. How d’you know it’s a promise? Get outta here….”

I hovered by an adjacent cubicle, listening with pleasure to this manic spiel. Debbie has been my great discovery-the undisputed CompuWorld sales star of the year. I hired her to fill the Telesales space vacated by me after I got the promotion. There were other suitable candidates, but what really sold me on Debbie was not just her explosive motor-mouth hunger for the position (“You give me the job, Mr. Allen, you’ll have no regrets. And when I say no regrets, I mean, like, no no no regrets”). It was also her back story-the darker details of her life that she didn’t list on her resume but that, with a little gentle probing from me, she divulged. Like how she grew up in an East New York project. And how her daddy did a permanent bunk back to San Juan when she was four. And how she was pregnant at seventeen and widowed at nineteen, after her low-life husband irritated his drug-dealing employers by pocketing the proceeds of a coke deal. And how she went back to high school and landed a secretarial job and finally found a way out of East New York, via a tiny one-bedroom in Stuyvesant Town where she now lived with her elderly mother and young son, Raul. And how she knew she could sell anybody anything-all she needed was someone like me to give her a shot.

“… So are we doin’ this or what? Like I said, it’s seven-eighteen now, shop here’s about to close. And come tomorrow… yeah, right, uh-huh, sure, sure, sure, no other competitors near you, copy approval, fifty-two five… We on the same page here?”

I watched as all the muscles in her face went taut and her eyes snapped shut, like someone unable to watch a lottery draw. Then, suddenly, her shoulders slackened, and her face slipped into an expression of weary relief.

“Okay, Mr. Godfrey, you got it. I’ll call tomorrow, we’ll deal with all the fine print then. Have a nice night.”

She pulled off her headset and pressed her forehead into her palms.

“You close?” I asked.

“I closed,” she said, sounding as exhausted as a sprinter who’d just hit the tape.

“Who was it?”

Dust Bust “America’s Favorite Computer Dustshield Equipment.”

” She shook her head, then looked up and gave me a jaded smile. I knew what she was thinking. kill myself, I shred my vocal cords, I act as if this is a life-or-death matter. And what’s the payoff? Landing a lousy quarter-page ad by some guy who makes slipcovers for computer screens.

I shrugged back as if to say, Welcome to sales. But God, how I knew that post-closing feeling-the sense of depletion, of loss. You’ve won… and yet, what have you won? You’re someone who sells space in a magazine. In the great spectrum of human endeavor, what you do is negligible, maybe even worthless. But, as I always tell any new sales staff I hire, the real object of the exercise-the reason you expend all that effort cajoling and flattering and wheedling the client-is self-validation. Because when you close-when you get that yes-there is a flicker of triumph. You’ve talked someone into something. Your point of view has prevailed. You’ve verified your worth. For that day, anyway.

“Nothing wrong with Dust Bust I said.

“They’ve been around for ten, twelve years. Good product, good distribution network, not much in the way of competition. They should be a nice steady customer for you. Way to go, Debbie.”

She beamed at me.

“Thanks, Mr. Allen.”

“You ever going to call me Ned?”

“When you’re not my boss anymore.”

“You mean, when you’re running the show around here.”

“Not gonna happen in this life.”