No Vision All Drive, 3rd Edition

Chapter 9 The ZOLL Years

After the long and exhausting process of selling the company there was to be no rest. ZOLL’s annual sales meeting was scheduled for the week after the deal was done, with a hundred or so salespeople from around the world attending. We knew that the WesTech salespeople would be there, as would the support folks, so we tried to be as ready as we could. We wanted to immediately change the reporting structure so that the WesTech salespeople reported to Bob and not up through the ZOLL organization. That was easy to accomplish. What was harder was to have answers to all their questions. They had four salespeople and we had two. We’d decided to have a joint sales force that would sell all products, but sales territories naturally overlapped and people wanted to know what was going to happen to them. Bob and I did our best to answer their questions, but all four of the WesTech reps eventually left, one right away and the other three within a couple of years.

In addition to preparing for the sales meeting we needed to work up a budget for Ernie, which he’d requested right after the sale closed. Later I would learn about the ZOLL budgeting process and find out that a budget takes a couple of months to put together, but since it was due when the sale closed, Bob and I had to create the budget on the plane on the way to Cape Cod. It was accepted without revision. Of course, we then had to live with delivering what we had promised, which turned out to be not so ...