When you work in retail sales, you will often have to try to upsell customers with things like extended warranties or other products.

What would you do if upper management was stressing the importance of these types of things more than even selling their main products?

That is the situation the salesman in this story found himself in, so he found a bit of a loophole that allowed him to make huge sales numbers that would really hurt the company in the end.

Check it out.

Sell more warranties? You got it boss!

Long ago while in grad school I worked at a big box electronics store doing a commissioned sales gig.

The job wasn’t all that bad, but as with all big box retailers they really wanted you to push their lame personal service contracts which was their fancy word for an extended store warranty.

“Where da real money is made!” as they say.

This place was a way for me to make money on the side while finishing the last leg of school, so I didn’t bother with the warranties all that much.

Good, I hate pushy sales people.

I’d mention them, they were good money, but I wasn’t pushy with customers.

Then a perfect storm hit that allowed me to not only make some money, but a LOT of money, all while having some fun at the store’s expense.

Perfect storm ingredient 1: Management started heavily hinting that they were going to start writing up salespeople if they didn’t start selling X amount of warranties per week and getting X amount of people to sign up for their useless store credit card.

Perfect storm ingredient 2: This store had a generic low price “store brand” of networking hardware.

I’m sure this is a huge mess for the company.

Well it turns out the company’s buyer and some other management people had taken massive kickbacks from this low price brand to keep them in the store which resulted in a lot of problems from on high.

The buyer and anyone else in on the scandal was fired.

In addition, prices were slashed and commissions were raised to get this brand out of the store as fast as possible.

So thinking about my new weekly goal and wanting to be a good customer, I started selling warranties more aggressively with the following speech to customers:

This is a brilliant sales tactic.

“So I know you haven’t heard of this brand compared to your Netgears and your Linksys, but think of it like this. You can buy this router that does the same job for $20, get a $10 warranty, save $40 because they’re having a fire sale, and if it breaks then you come back and they have to replace it. The real beauty is they’re getting rid of this line so they have to replace it with the next best competitor which means you get a full price brand name item for the $10 it cost you for the warranty.”

Surprisingly, a lot of people saw the logic of this and bought their fire sale tech along with a warranty that often cost as much as the item being sold.

Eventually my boss, who was a pretty cool guy, called me over to ask why my warranty numbers were suddenly so high.

I liked the guy so I explained exactly what I was doing.

He stared for a moment, then said “you shouldn’t be selling a $10 warranty on a $10 item we’re discontinuing.”

I explained I was just following upper management’s orders.

Everyone hated upper management so he just smiled and shook his head.

I’m sure lots of people were very happy with this.

I kept right on selling warranties until the fire sale was over and had some of the best weekly commission numbers I ever got at that store thanks to the fire sale commission prices and the added warranties.

The real kicker?

The store manager who’d threatened writing people up if they didn’t hit warranty targets came over a couple of times to congratulate me on all the great work I was doing.

She could see the numbers, but apparently my boss forgot to mention to her why that number suddenly spiked.

Helping customers plus hurting upper management? Brilliant.

Let’s see what the people in the comments think about this story.

This commenter has a good way of handling this sales tactic.

This is a great way to get those sales.

This person got fired for something similar.

I would love to know as well.

They just can’t stop themselves from pushing the warranty.

I guess sometimes those warranties really are a good deal.

But not every time.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.