Sometimes strange things happen in a selling environment – I thought I’d share one of them with you.  Back in my PTC days, we competed regularly with companies like Computervision, SDRC, IBM and others.  Usually this competition ended up as a benchmark where several competitors would design parts that the customer/prospect provided and the company that designed them the fastest and most effectively would win.

One of those battles pitted PTC against Computervision to win the design engineering community at Whirlpool.  It was a very hotly contested battle.  CV had their friends and PTC had their friends.  The company was split within the engineering community and 1/2 the crowd wanted PTC and 1/2 the crowd wanted CV.

The benchmark time was established and both companies would be presenting in the same room – designing away while their competition did the same thing across the room.  It was like going to a drag race with two software companies.  PTC was incredibly talented in winning opportunities like this.  Everyone from the CEO on down knew what was going on and a fair number of resources were committed to winning deals like this.  The PTC benchmark team was prepared to do the best job possible.

The night before the team was to fly out to St. Joe, Michigan to get ready to present on the following day, the Regional Director from that geography was flying back to Detroit from Boston after preparing all weekend for the big benchmark.  He happened to be sitting in the Northwest Worldperks club doing some work when over the top of the cube he heard one of the Whirlpool engineer’s name mentioned.  He knew that this individual was on the committee and favored Computervision.  As he listened intently, he heard someone on the other side of the wall say “Yes, we have all the parts, we have everyone of them designed, nobody at Whirlpool will know anything and we will kill PTC”.  He discretely walked around to see his competitor talking on the phone with evidently his management announcing that yes the inside friend to Computervision had indeed provided confidential information to Computervision in hopes that it would help them win the business.

The PTC Regional manager immediately called the head of the committee for Whirlpool, to let him know of the conversation he had just heard.  The Whirlpool head of the committee while disappointed in his team’s actions said “I will take care of it”.  Two days later when both companies showed up to do the benchmark, the head of the committee announced he had made some changes to the parts they were going to design and instead was truly going to make it a “Blind” benchmark as he was the only one who knew what parts were to be designed.  He then presented both companies with several parts to do in the benchmark.  Neither company had ever seen them before.

Needless to say the Computervision engineers who thought they had a leg up were now at a severe loss.  The PTC engineers who assumed it was going to be a blind benchmark to begin with went about their work and proceeded to win the benchmark.

Yes, the Computervision guy cheated, yes he had a leg up on PTC and had he been able to keep his mouth shut he might actually have won the benchmark.

I am sure we all have stories like that from our past where we’ve worked hard to win business and something has gone amuck in this case it was the an overzealous sales rep shouting his mouth off that killed any chance CV had of winning the business.

Good selling.