“Glengarry Glen Ross” may be more than 30 years old, but the film still holds sway with salespeople aggressively trying to make their quotas and companies looking to foster competition among employees.
That’s not a good thing, according to sales consultant Dan Saso.
“The ‘always be closing’ A, B, C mantra that people espouse, that’s B.S. It’s not always the right time to close,” said Saso, who has worked in sales for tech companies and startups for more than a decade.
Saso said he often hears other salespeople refer to the film’s iconic catchphrase, as recently as the day before his interview with Marketplace.About seven years into his career, Saso realized aggressive tactics, like calling the same leads dozens of times or discounts to create fake urgency, aren’t a recipe for success. That’s especially true now as many buyers actively avoid talking to salespeople.
“My connect rate on calls, even in the last year, has gone from maybe 3% to 1%,” he said. “There are a lot of technologies that are trying to help adjust to that, like auto dialers that let you call 200, 300 [people] within a couple hours. But the reality is that buyers don’t want to engage with you.”
Salespeople had more leverage with buyers pre-internet. They could pitch potential buyers on their “good information” about products and deals that only they knew about. Most consumers nowadays prefer to do their own research and buy on their own.
The salesmen in “Glengarry” are aggressive, but their tactics don’t always pay off. Toward the end of the film, Al Pacino’s character, Richard Roma, thinks he’s closed a big sale, until his buyer comes into the office to renege on the deal. Jack Lemmon’s character, Shelley Levene, thinks he’s suckered “Harriett and blah blah Nyborg” into buying $80,000 of real estate, but his office manager says the couple can’t buy anything. The Nyborgs are broke, unstable and “just like talking to salesmen.”
The film’s salesmen blame poor-quality leads — contact information for individuals who are most likely to buy — for their failure to close. Carole Mahoney, author of “Buyer First: Grow Your Business With Collaborative Selling,” blames the “numbers game” mentality.
“If you’re just constantly barraging people, just checking in, following up, looking for an update, it’s about what you want. You want to know when the deal is going to close, and that has nothing to do with what your buyer wants or needs,” Mahoney said. “It actually alienates people and lengthens your sales process. The more you push, the more they’re going to pull away.”
“Glengarry Glen Ross” also suggests the salesmen were intentionally set up to fail, regardless of their skill. The real estate company’s leaders, represented by Alec Baldwin’s character, Blake, say they will only give the better leads to salesmen who can close the older, staler leads.
Several sales leaders have told Mahoney they set unrealistic, impossible expectations as a distorted form of motivation.
“Even though we don’t have boiler rooms anymore, we still have that perception that we’re going to pit salespeople against each other, we’re going to raise their quota year after year after year, but we’re not going to give them the resources or the training to help them to perform better,” she said. “It is a sure recipe for burnout.”
When Mahoney helps companies hire and train salespeople, she challenges their reverence for competition over collaboration. Companies are more apt to reconsider aggressive tactics when their revenue hit rock bottom, Mahoney said.
“When you create a culture like that, it filters through to how [the salespeople] treat their buyers,” she said. “How you treat your team is how your team is going to treat your customers.”
Movies like “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” merely perpetuate “used-car salesman” stereotypes of slick-haired, unethical, macho men who will force their way to a sale, no matter the cost.
“Is your intent self-serving, or are you actually trying to help someone? A lot of sales is very much about me, me, me,” Saso said. “When the intent is ‘We need to show 20% quarter-over-quarter growth to get to our next round of funding, to get to where we can maximize our exit and our IPO,’ then it’s not about the customer experience or the product.”Mahoney thinks that films like “Joy” and “The Pursuit of Happyness”do a better job of showing what good sales practices look like in the real world — the protagonists are dogged and resilient. And they put their customers first, above their own need to close.
Workplace catch phrases
Have you ever had a boss try to motivate you with a phrase similar to “always be closing”? Was it good advice or was it forced? We’d love to hear about it.
Write to us at extracredit@marketplace.org or fill out the form below, and we’ll share the best responses in a future newsletter.
How to watch “Glengarry Glen Ross”
The movie is available to stream for free with ads on YouTube. It’s also streaming on Hoopla and Kanopy for free for some library card holders, and on Peacock and Netflix with a subscription.
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