I agree with the premise John, but that's seldom the case. John Doe walks into the store and buys his first $99 compressor, takes it home and doesn't have a clue, calls or goes back to the store and someone in sales has to teach him how to use it. You could always tell the person to RTFM, but that will come at the expense of a dissatisfied customer. For every one pissed customer you make you lose 10 sales. In the end you help the always right customer at the expense of missed opportunity and lost manpower. GC can stop most of this by tracking productivity, or at least track productivity, come up with an analysis, a baseline, and a plan to enhance productivity.
In my experience if i designed Peavey products that required some salesman to explain how to use them, they died in flames after too many customers asked for their money back.
We even taught seminars in MS for sales-people but the instruction was all about putting the customer into the right level product, NOT TEACHING THEM HOW TO USE THEM.
I did design one $199 (retail) compressor and it was pretty damn simple, fast-med-slow switch for attack/release, etc. Not remotely as complicated as the compressor I designed for Loft back before I worked at Peavey. If you couldn't operate that Peavey (AMR) compressor you probably couldn't tie your own shoes or dress yourself.
Of course maybe I'm wrong...
JR
