6.1 Introduction
Chapter 6: Wholegoods, the Uncontrollable
Tuesday, October 19, 1999
The dealership’s Wholegoods manager, Dan, issued a memo to all sales personnel, including K. The memo, plain and urgent, requested that each salesperson list those tasks that interfered with customer contact—the tasks they believed could be delegated elsewhere. Its closing line bore the tone of command veiled in collegiality:
ALL SALES PERSONNEL: PLEASE LIST BELOW ALL SALES FUNCTIONS YOU PERFORM THAT KEEP YOU FROM CALLING ON CUSTOMERS. I AM SPECIFICALLY INTERESTED IN THOSE FUNCTIONS THAT YOU FEEL CAN BE PERFORMED BY SOMEONE ELSE. BE SPECIFIC AS POSSIBLE. YOUR PROMPT RESPONSE IS NEEDED.
THANKS, DAN
Dan’s memo sought to simplify—to separate what belonged to sales from what might be delegated, as though the work of selling could be disentangled from the field’s complexity.
The memo would arouse little more than a whimper from most of the department’s salespeople. Yet one response it provoked was stentorian, revealing that the sales function could not be so easily compartmentalized.
Wednesday, October 20, 1999
Zach, the dealership’s sole school bus salesperson, replied with a four-page handwritten memo in all CAPS. Its opening lines described the terrain with precision:
SCHOOL BUS BUSINESS
(INTERFERENCE FACTORS IMPACTING SALES ACTIVITY)
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BUSINESS:
SCHOOL BUS CUSTOMERS ARE GOVERNMENT AGENCIES THAT REQUIRE COMPETITIVE BIDS. ALL DEALS ARE 100% FACTORY ORDERS WITH COMPLICATED SPECIFICATIONS, INCLUDING SEAT PLANS AND LETTERING DIAGRAMS. ALSO, PRODUCT VALIDATION REQUIRES STATE INSPECTIONS TO CERTIFY THE VEHICLE PRIOR TO DELIVERY.
THE ENTIRE PROCESS IS FURTHER COMPLICATED BY A TOTALLY MANUAL PROCEDURE TO GENERATE VARIOUS DOCUMENTS TO SUPPORT EVERY BUSINESS TRANSACTION.
GIVEN THE CURRENT LEVEL OF SCHOOL BUS ACTIVITY AT [THE DEALERSHIP], IT IS ESTIMATED THAT A SALESMAN DEVOTES LESS THAN 10% OF AVAILABLE WORK TIME DEVELOPING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS. THE CURRENT WORK STRUCTURE IS NOT CONDUCIVE TO REALIZING OUR REAL SALES POTENTIAL.
OUTLINED ON THE ATTACHED SHEETS ARE IMPORTANT ACTIVITIES THAT SHOULD BE DELEGATED TO AN INSIDE SALES SUPPORT PERSON IN PART TO INCREASE THE PRODUCTIVITY OF EXTERNAL SALES.
Zach’s detailed listing of tasks—from sales proposals and bid quotes to customer support and delivery—made plain that the work of selling is embedded in a web of overlapping practices: administrative, regulatory, technical. His concluding words underscored the point:
THIS LIST IS NOT TO SUGGEST THAT A BUS SALES PERSON CAN DIVORCE HIMSELF COMPLETELY FROM THESE ACTIVITIES. HOWEVER, IT IS IN THE BEST INTEREST OF THE DEALERSHIP TO KEEP SALES FOCUSED ON GENERATING REVENUE RATHER THAN DIVERTING ATTENTION TO BACKFILL ADMINISTRATION MATTERS.
Zach’s memo did more than answer Dan’s question; it mapped the field’s contradictions. Wholegoods work—“SALES ACTIVITY”—is not contained within clean role boundaries. The salesperson operates across organizational roles and responsibilities, pointing up communities of practice whose demands interweave in ways no single function could isolate.
Zach’s otherwise quiet autonomy grew in response to this structure. As he explained to K:
“The Sales manager had little or no interest in the bus business, which only makes sense given that he’s been dealing with trucks and trailers forever. He didn’t care a lick about buses, couldn’t care less. He would literally go to sleep when I talked to him about it… As long as I didn’t step on somebody too much, especially your uncle, I just had to go out and do what was necessary to make the business work.”
Zach’s plea echos what the philosopher wrote of the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy’s characters:
“They are not people or subjects, they are collections of intensive sensations, each is such a collection, a packet, a bloc of variable sensations. There is a strange respect for the individual, an extraordinary respect: not because he would seize upon himself as a person and be recognized as a person, in the French way, but on the contrary because he saw himself and saw others as so many ‘unique chances’ — the unique chance from which one combination or another had been drawn. Individuation without a subject.”1
Zach—the consummate salesman—is not simply a person in a role; he moves through the dealership like a packet of variable sensations, a bloc of practices assembled in motion as he beats his drum and composes his “value-circles,” effectively holding the fragments together where the dealership’s formal organization could not.
“Individuals, packets of sensations, run over the heath like a line of flight or a line of deterritorialization of the earth.”2
The Field of Participation Unfolded
Wholegoods is the dealership’s heath: a smooth space, a space of chance encounters and mischance, where no boundary between sales and support, no hierarchy of function, can fully hold.
In this chapter, we demonstrate with reference to the evidence how the activity of selling requires constant passage across overlapping communities: sales, administration, compliance, OEMs, government agencies, family, and non-family alike. And it is through this passage that the learning curriculum unfolds and the body of the learner, K’s body, achieves its “fully erect posture”—not by mastering a singular domain, but by composing and recomposing relations across domains, in ceaseless motion.3
Gilles Deleuze and Clare Parent, Dialogues, pp.39-40.
Gilles Deleuze and Clare Parent, Dialogues, p.40.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.65.