November 4th, 2003

Congratulations!

You're the proud owner of a brand new 2004 model sales person. Before introducing this sales person to your ecosystem, please read these instructions in their entirety and store them in a safe place. You may need to refer to these instructions in the future.

Please fill out your warranty card and mail it back to us within ten days. Should your sales person require updating or prove defective in any way, we will need the information requested on thewarranty card to reach you in a timely manner.

Proper setup of your new sales person

After you have removed your new sales person from his or her box and protective wrapper, please provide sufficient light, water and telephone so that he or she can thrive.

Important: Keep all administrative tasks away from your new sales person. Your sales person is an expensive, finely tuned mechanism and will not perform well on administrative tasks. These tasks may gum up the works and cause your sales person to cease functioning entirely.

Specific leadership and direction

Your new sales person can move in any direction at any speed at any time. You must provide specific instructions regarding your desired direction and speed.

Failure to provide these directions in a clear manner may result in your sales person careening from one customer or market to the next. Alternately, without specific clear directions your sales person may sit still for hours on end and devote full motive energies to Microsoft Solitaire.

Your new sales person will not thrive if he or she remains in your ecosystem. Sales people must periodically visit other ecosystems. In fact, your sales person will thrive and prosper even further if other species of your own ecosystem, such as CEO, VP Engineering, VP Marketing, participate in these visits.

Play with others

Sales people will congregate with one another and are inclined to intermingle to the exclusion of other species, including management, prospects, and even customers. Should they do this, you will experience a dissipation of your revenue and you will be unable to continue to support any of the species in your ecosystem other than the lawyers.

Make sure that your sales person has daily contact with other species. While they may feign indifference at mingling with prospects or customers, you must insist that they do so and that they report back to you regularly. If you do not monitor their interaction through these reports, they will not interact.

Care and feeding

Sales people thrive on a diet of qualified leads, referrals, effective marketing collateral and periodic praise. Withhold any of these and your sales person may not thrive.

In addition, your sales person will make many demands regarding care and feeding. Most of these demands will sound unreasonable. Please note that they are programmed at the factory to do so and this does not indicate a systemic problem with the mechanism. You cannot turn this feature off, nor can you safely ignore it.

For further information

An advanced programming manual is available for your new sales person. While the sales person can be reprogrammed in the field, this reprogramming requires the appropriate tools.

In addition, a complete set of accessories is available, including market maps, CRM tools, lead generation activities, sales collateral, and more. Other customers have reported that sales people are more active and the company ecosystem grows more quickly when sales people have these accessories.

Good luck

A sales person, if properly cared for, can be a great asset to your organization. Provide the proper care and feeding so that your sales people...and your organization...will thrive and grow!

Thanks for reading!