The Job

The Job by Douglas Kennedy

LITTLE. BROWN AND COMPANY

A Little Brown, Book First published in Great Britain by Little, Brown and Company 1998 Copyright (c) Douglas Kennedy 1998 The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitional and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 0316 643831 (HB)

1 t Typeset in Caslon 540 by M Rules Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St. Ives pie Little, Brown and Company (UK) Brettenham House Lancaster Place T,nnHnn

For my father, Thomas J. Kennedy, and for my brother Roger

The true way leads along a tightrope, which is not stretched aloft but just above the ground. It seems more designed to trip one than to be walked upon.

Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point is to be reached.

-Franz Kafka

Business was good today. I wheeled, I dealed, I schmoozed, I closed.

By seven in the evening-before calling it quits for the night-I followed a piece of advice given to me by my first boss, and listed the major things accomplished in the past ten hours. There were three highlights: (1)1 nailed down a double-page spread with Multi-Micro, (2) I finally managed to score a meeting next Friday with the head of marketing at Icon, and (3) Ivan Dolinsky, my main outside sales guy for the tri state area, called me from Stamford in a state of high excitement, saying that GBS was about to commit to a major multipage insert-a deal I’d been pressing him to conclude for weeks.

Like I said, not a bad day’s work-and one which leaves me on target to hit my April quota a full nine weeks ahead of schedule. Of course, there are a lot of variables at work here. Will Ed Fisher, chief marketing god of Icon, finally buy my act and start throwing some serious business my way? Will Ivan really be able to wrap up this GBS sale-or is this going to be another of his also-rans? (He’s had three back-to-back, and it’s getting me worried.) And though I did talk AdTel into a premium position spread for their new Sat Pad DL notebook, I was a bit disappointed when their media sales honcho, Don Dowling, would only green-light a single display. Especially as most of our phone calls consisted of me dangling bait, incentives, sweeteners-anything to get him to agree to more space.

“Don. it’s Ned Allen here.”

“Bad timing, Ned,” he answered in his thick Canarsie whine.

“I’m heading out the door.”

“Then I’ll cut to the chase.”

“I’m telling you, I’m running-” “Don, you know that at ninety-five grand for a back-of-the-book double-pager we’re still thirty percent cheaper than the competition….”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. But their circulation is thirty-five higher than yours.”

“Only if you believe their figures. You see the ABC stats last month? Our circulation was up seven percent for the third straight month in a row….”

“They still got one point two million versus your seven-eighty- which, for my money, is a sizable circulation gap.”

“Look, Don, you know as well as I do that when it comes to niche marketing, numbers like that mean nada. I mean, so what if they’ve got one point two? For a high-end product like the Sat Pad DL, you need the sort of mid-to high-market site that we can offer. You just go it alone with them, you’re strictly aiming for the bargain basement. Okay, okay, I know they’ve got the stats, but so do the Chinese. A billion people. Too bad only a thousand of them can afford to buy anything more than a bucket of rice. Same situation here.”

Don Dowling sighed loudly and said, “Ned, you tried this song and dance on me last month….”

“And last month you wouldn’t bite. But now we’re doing business. A double spreader. A great start to our relationship.”

“How many times do I have to tell you-it’s not a relationship … it’s a one-night stand.”

“I know, I know-but all relationships start as one-night stands. You finally talk her into bed, next thing you know, it’s love and marriage. And when you see the results you get from the back of our book-” “Then maybe we’ll do another one. But I’m not committing us to anything more.”

“Even with an offer of a twenty-five percent discount and a guaranteed premium position for the entire spring quarter?”

“We’re covering old ground here. Your guy Ivan offered me the same deal last week.”

“Ivan offered you twenty percent. But as his boss I can-” “What? Flatter my ass with an additional five percent sweetener? Get a life.”

“Do the math, Don. We’re talking nearly twenty-two grand that you’ll be saving on prime display space.”

“I’ve done the maths, Ned. I’ve made a decision.”

“Tell you what: We’ll throw in a four-color bleed for the April issue.”

“Ned, this conversation’s history.”

“How ‘bout lunch next week? You in the city?”

“Dallas.”

“Week after?”

“Ned…”

“You like French, we can do Lutece…”

“Since when has CompuWorld been able to afford Lutece?”

“Since we became players.”

“You’re still in third place.”

“We try harder, Don. So how about a week from next Friday?”

“You’re a pain in the ass, Ned.”

“But an effective one. Next Friday?”

Another elongated sigh from Don Dowling.

“Call my secretary,” he said, and hung up.

Got ‘em! Well, sort of. Like I said, we’re talking variables here.

“Call my secretary” is about the oldest kiss-off line in the book. But in the case of Don Dowling, I think it means he’s finally willing to sit down with me. No doubt the prospect of stuffing his face at Lutece is also something of an incentive. After all, lunch at a him-dred-buck-a-head restaurant-surrounded by the city’s heaviest hitters-can’t help but make a guy from Canarsie feel like he’s finally hit the big leagues (hell, I’m a poster boy for upward mobility myself, having grown up in a shit-kicker corner of Maine). But Dowling also knows that there’s a price attached to accepting my invitation. By agreeing to break overpriced bread with me, he’s signaled the fact that a barrier has come down-and that a new game could be played between us. Whether he decides to play this game will depend entirely on the success of the lunch.

Selling, you see, all comes down to one word: persuasion. And by consenting to lunch, Dowling has also indicated that he’s willing to sit through a display of my persuasiveness-and find out if I can talk him into an ongoing commercial commitment. He’ll want to see how I schmooze him, check out my style. Am I the shrewd shark who gets him talking about everything but business until the coffee arrives? Or will I be the overanxious type who starts hustling him before the bread hits the table? He’ll gauge whether I’m the sort of salesman who’s willing to peddle his elderly mother to the Arabs if it means getting results … or some grace-and-favor merchant who’s deigning to do business with a dweeb. Most tellingly, he’ll be assessing the way I approach him. Too much deference and he’ll hate me for overplaying my hand. Too little, and hell think I consider him nothing more than a Brooklyn nouveau.

Again, it all comes down to a bunch of variables. Variables are what keep the game interesting. And variables are also what keep me awake at three in the morning, worried about whether tomorrow’s the day when it all starts to implode-when my well-honed pitch would finally lose its kick, stopped dead in its tracks by the one word I dread most in life: No.

So far (and I’ve only been in this business for four years), I’ve managed to dodge that nightmare that every salesman fears: the loss of his persuasive powers. My boss, Chuck Zanussi, summed it all up beautifully:

“You know, Ned,” he’d said to me over lunch around eighteen months ago, “every goddamn bookshop in this country is crammed with volume after volume about how to close that deal and be the biggest swinging dick in your division. But forget all the business-guru, ‘channel-into-your-influence-zones’ crap. At the end of the day, selling is about just one thing: getting someone else to say yes. That’s it. That’s the object of the exercise, the bottom fucking line. Yes. Success is yes; failure is no. It’s that simple. In fact, the way I see it, everything in life comes down to talking people into giving you a yes. Unless you’re into date rape, you don’t get laid without a yes. You don’t get married without a yes. You don’t get a mortgage for a house without a yes. You don’t get a job without a yes. And you certainly don’t keep a job without a shitload of yesses.

“Y’see. that’s what you do every day: You procure yesses for this company. And you do it pretty well, I might add… which is why I’m bumping you up a notch.”

And that’s when he offered me the job of Northeast regional sales manager for the third biggest computer magazine in America.

The magazine is called CompuWorld, and the only reason we’re in third place is because we’re the new kids in town. Just five years old, but without question the real comer in a crowded market. Don’t take my word for it. Just consider these numbers: The two titles ahead of us-PC Globe and Computer America-have each shed a total of 34 percent market share since we showed up on the block in ‘92. Of course, back then, every industry analyst was predicting we’d be on our way to the morgue within eighteen months. We’re talking 2 million readers already for the established titles, who needs a third? No room for an upstart-blah, blah, blah.

O ye of little faith. Look at us now. Circulation of seven-eighty, a mere fifty thousand behind the number-two boys, Computer America. Hell, two years ago, there was half a million separating us. Now they’re bleeding faster than a hemophiliac, and we’re the title in the ascendant. You see that story on us in Ad Week “The CompuWorld Phenomenon”-the basic gist of which pointed to our magazine as the beneficiary of the biggest readership defection in the past ten years. Want to know why? Editorial quality and pure visual class. I mean, when it comes to the caliber of layout and graphics, we’re the Vanity Fair of consumer magazines. Okay, I take Don Dowling’s point: We’re still a sizable distance behind PC Globe in terms of circulation. But, like I told him, they’re Filene’s Basement to our Saks Fifth Avenue. I mean, if you’re only interested in low-end mass market clientele, by all means blow most of your media budget on a couple of big PC Globe spreads. But if you’re trying to reach the more sophisticated corporate and personal consumer… Well, let’s face it, there’s only one choice in the marketplace, and that’s…

Sorry, sorry-I’m pushing a little too hard here. As my wife, Lizzie, likes to tell me, sometimes I forget that there are hours of the day when I don’t have to be chasing a yes. It’s kind of an obsessive business-sales-and one which demands nonstop results. Just consider my monthly and annual quotas. CompuWorld publishes twelve issues a year. The averaee size of the book is around

320 pages-of which I am responsible for seventy pages of advertising copy. On average, we sell a page for $35,000 (though premium positions, like the back cover, can cost up to 30 percent more). Now 35k times 70 equals $2.45 million. My monthly quota. Multiply that figure by twelve and you come up with $29.4 milliona figure that scares the shit out of me every time I think about it.

Thankfully, I’m not the only person in our office who lives in terror of that $29.4 million mountain. As regional sales manager for the Northeast, I’m in charge of a staff of ten, all of whom have to hit their own individual sales targets every month. There are a half dozen tele sales operators who spend every day working the phones, trying to close small deals. They’re my bread-and-butter people. They hustle small retailers, modest-size software companies, and all those penny-ante operators who fill the Classified section at the back of the book. A lot of the uppity schmucks in Editorial make fun of the outfits we snag for Classified-mom-and-pop businesses that peddle discount bar code scanners, or software pawnbrokers who offer “Cash for Your Old Memory.” But, believe me, all those little eighth-of-a-pagers are an essential component of the overall sales strategy. And they account for 20 percent of the space we have to fill each month.

My Telesales team works closely with my four outside sales reps-Ivan Dolinsky in tri state Phil Sirio in the five boroughs, Dave Maduro in Massachusetts (the Boston area is probably the key software manufacturing market in the Northeast), and Doug Bluehorn covering the rest of New England. The pressure is on these guys nonstop to score the big half-and full-pagers, and to network heavily with all the media sales and marketing people for the major players in our region: AdTel, Icon, InfoCom, and the monster GBS (Global Business Systems, the biggest computer hardware manufacturer on the planet-of which we all wanted a piece).