Bill Cody Contract Salesman Bill

¶ … Bill Cody Contract

Salesman Bill Cody offered a contract to a customer with a premium of 30%. This contract did not go through the standard review process that all contracts are required to go through, but was simply created and sent to the customer. Mr. Cody states that this was due to the fact that the customer was in a hurry and had a strict deadline. Therefore, the customer needed the contract much sooner than otherwise would have been expected. With the contract being created and sent in this way there was no way for the standard checks and balances system to determine if the contract should be acceptable. Mr. Cody has not offered justification for why this customer was charged so much more than the current price. While the Vice President of Sales certainly supports Mr. Cody, CFO Cogburn does not, and believes that the contract must be refigured and resubmitted to the client.

Mr. Cogburn's position is twofold, revolving around the allegedly unjustified price increase and the lack of a review on this particular contract, which would certainly have caught the price difference before it made its way to the client. He believes that the contract should be corrected to within 15% of the current prices, as is the standard operating procedure, and at that point the contract should be reintroduced to the client. However, Mr. Cody and the Vice President of Sales have some concerns with that. Chief among those concerns is that the client may no longer feel comfortable with Mr. Cody and may decide at that point that he will not be interested in buying the other five products in the Grand Estimator line. This would, of course, cost the company a lot of money in the long run.

Despite Mr. Cody's concerns the recommendation is to correct the contract. The client does not need to be told that Mr. Cody charged him a 30% premium and that he should not have done that, or that the review process was not undertaken because the client was in a hurry. Under no circumstances should the client be made to feel as though his need to get the contract quickly played a role in why the price was different or caused a problem for the company. This would certainly lose him to a competitor. However, the client should not be overcharged, even if he agreed to the price. His conversations with others in the business world could show that he paid much more than his counterparts, and he might want to know why that was the case. This could stop him from ever purchasing anything else from the company, but he could also provide a lot of negative publicity for the company.