Reputation in my family

A place where I have a strong reputation is with my family. When my extended family meets on holidays they view me in a certain way, a way that is based on the reputation that defines myself. I am the youngest member in my family so my reputation was always being the cute and innocent sibling. I was always looked at as the little baby in the eyes of my family. They would always be checking in on me making sure I had enough food and was having a good time. Over the years I have grown older, and with that my reputation has developed. I am not looked at as the little innocent kid nearly as much. My family asks me about college and about about my work life, they know that I am growing up quick. However, they still remember my old reputation of being the youngest and it comes out at times. Even though i'm an adult, I see them treating me like a little kid sometimes.

In my situation, I am doing everything in my power to break my old reputation, I want to be treated like an adult like the rest of my siblings are. To do this I always dress fancy to holidays, I like to make sure they see me looking nice. I talk clearly and act like an adult in conversations. Over the past few years I have been told how quickly I have grown up and how I am not the little kid that I used to be anymore, they are starting to think a new reputation of me. I definitely want to stray away from the reputations my family thought of me, I want to be viewed as a successful adult. 

In regards to cashing in, I have done this before for an immediate gain. In high school I was in the marching band, which was a great experience, but it played a major role in my reputation. With that said, when I got to college I decided to not do marching band and I didn't talk about it at all. I wanted marching band to be out of my reputation forever so that I could be looked at in a different light by my college friends. I changed my reputation to look less geeky to make different types of friends then the ones I made in high school.

Triangle Arrangment

My brother started working as a Sales Representative at Cars.com. His primary job was to contact car dealerships, build relations with them, and eventually close sales with them to purchase online ad packages through the Cars.com platform. The triangle in this case is my brother being the agent and the two principles being his clients and his managers. From talking to my brother I have learned a good amount of insight on the expectations for sales performance rom the managers perspective, and also from the agents perspective.

With that said, it is in the Sales Representatives best interest to get as many closings as possible, for each closing you receive a significant commission incentive. The managers set prices that the Sales Representatives are supposed to base for each and every client my brother talks to, but those numbers are not always what my brother sells. In order to get more sales my brother has given discounts to clients, especially if they are reoccurring customers or if it is a very large deal. He does this in the best interest of himself as well as the client. However, this is not something that management pushed the Sales Representatives to do, they push for he most money on each and every deal and they think the best way of doing this is to stick to the price they set out. At the end of they day, my brothers perspective is that he is reading the customers well enough to see if they are going to buy the package at the high price, if they are not as interested as he would like this is when he gets into cutting discounts for the clients. When he does this he is maximizing the amount of customers he can close on and not limiting the amount of customers he will succeed on selling to in his book of business.

In practice this difference in views got resolved by my brother being one of the highest performers numbers wise. Although he might have done it in not a conventional way, this was easily looked passed when management saw how much money he brought into the company. Another way to resolve this could be to give management commission that is tied together with the Sales Representatives sales success. This will make management more inclined to seeing success from Sales Representatives, and be more allowing of giving discounts when they are necessary to ensure that sales are made as often as possible.

I do think that some managers may always look down at my brother for how he obtained his success. Most of them easily got over it due to how much money he brought in, but in the eyes of some he might have "failed" because he didn't do it sticking to the price that most stick to. He did satisfy his clients, himself, and the company as a whole though by bringing in many more customers then the typical Sales Representatives do.

Conflicts at Work

While working at Enterpise over the summer conflicts arose often, especially since I was at O'hare airport. The customers were generally in a bad mood having to wait in lengthy plane delays to long lines at the airport, when they finally got to talk to me things were not always as smooth as I would have wanted. For this post I want to talk about one situation in particular that was very tense. The customer had reserved a mini van for the weekend, he had a significant amount of luggage/passengers so he absolutely needed the mini van for his trip. I took care of him at the counter and then brought him outside to put him in his reserved mini van, but unfortunately we did not have a mini van on the lot. The managers mis-handled the amount of reservations that we had and did not account for the amount of mini vans that we needed. 

When there was not a mini van on the initial lot I asked the customer to patiently wait while I looked in the return lanes for one,  I could tell he was pestered but he let me check. When I got to the return lanes there was nothing, I had to tell this customer that we did not have a mini-van at the moment and that he could wait for one to arrive or that we could give him two smaller cars for the price of one. When I said this he exploded, he was screaming into my face, basically just tearing me apart for not having the car he reserved, which in all honesty he had the right to be angry. 

In his eyes he should have been able to get in and out of the car rental process very quickly, as he made a reservation before hand, but instead he was going to have to wait around for the car he needed. Also, what we offered him for compensation would have cost him twice as much in parking, twice as much in gas, and it would have split is family into two separate groups. This all is the reason he reached his boiling point and exploded. In my eyes I was just trying to find a way to get him in the car he reserved as quickly as possible, when I realized this was going to take a significant amount of time I offered a second option and told him the truth. When he did explode I felt that it was time for me to get my manager, he is the reason for the problem anyways, he tried to kill the situation with kindness he had a constant smile and open ears. My manager sent me to drive to our affiliate (National) to borrow one of there mini vans and let him take it on his trip, he also gave the man the entire trip for free,  just as a token for his troubles. I want to point something out really quick on giving away freebies. What I noticed is that it gets you out of the immediate problem, but in the long run it doesn't bring the customer back. Giving something away for free doesn't change the customers negative experience into a good one, either way you are likely to lose that customer forever to a competitor. At the end of the day the situation ended with the guy shrugging his shoulders and accepting the free trip, he was "happy" in the moment, but not long term. In my opinion, there is no way that customer comes back to Enterprise, and if he were asked about his experience he would certainly talk negatively about it. 

When the conflict became apparent to everyone it was the talk of the office for a few hours. It was almost like people were gossiping about it. It was right before my lunch break when it happened, so when I handed the situation of to my manager I went on my break, when I got to the break room everyone was talking about it and was asking me about it. When something like that happens in a corporate setting, people notice and the word spreads quickly. The situation could have been avoided with more careful planning and car management, our managers need to be more precise.