Wednesday, October 6, 2010

You're not just telling me what I want to hear now, are you?

Last week, me and a colleague had a meeting with one of our distributors to discuss one of our products that they were interested in starting selling. The distributor is made up of a bunch of really friendly guys and our companies have a quite long relationship in doing business together, so we are generally quite favorable to helping them out if possible.

However, during the meeting, when discussing their assumed projections a few years forward, it became quite clear that the volumes and prices that we were discussing really wasn't that attractive to us and could bring more trouble than it would be worth to us in the long run since some up front investments in getting systems set up etc. would be required.

As we were discussing and our counterpart mentioned the forecasted volumes and saw my big frown and concerned expression when they were quite significantly lower than we had been led to believe from earlier meetings, the guy promised that he would discuss with his boss an take another look at the volumes, but during our talk, it seemed like any significant changes in volumes would be difficult...

Two hours later, I'm back in the office and get an e-mail from them with a new estimate, this time the volumes are up five times from what we discussed in the meeting, turning it from a possible "volunteer" job to quite an attractive future business to us. I can't help but shake the feeling that I over-frowned it in the meeting...

4 comments:

aimlesswanderer said...

You can always tweak the numbers in a model to make them look better, but are those numbers realistic, and what assumptions are they based on?

It looks really dodgy if the numbers are mysteriously improved after you appear less than enthusiastic...

Evacomics said...

Well, better frown now than later!

Martin said...

Frown like Luke Perry and youll get even more. Don´t listen to aimless!

Mr. Salaryman said...

Aimless - Well yep... However in this case I felt that I'm better off not digging too deep into the stuff, the guys are nice after all

Eva - I bet the frowning will continue!

Martin - I don't think Luke got nothing on my frown!

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