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Comment by tedunangst | Hacker News Reader

Account Execs being unable to delete reviews does not mean that account execs are unable to tell customers that they can.

"Give us money or bad things will happen" is a shakedown, regardless of whether bad things can or will happen.

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Not sure if you read the section below that where I talked about the part of the pitch that I feel is responsible for these issues. I don't rule out that a Account Exec wouldn't say something like that, but from my experience, Yelp is very serious about such instances and will most likely fire somebody who does that immediately. I say most likely because even with their exceptional training, people do make mistakes and that person might be able to convince Yelp it was unintentional - then again, I wouldn't be surprised if Yelp is at the point where they would fire somebody even if it were accidental.

There very easily could be an exception, especially with the number of Account execs they have right now, but it's clear from the very start of training to making actual calls that such actions will not be tolerated.

If they don't record sales calls, hard sells are predictable - so if they don't record sales calls, they might want it to happen and want plausible deniability.

It would be very easy to avoid these types of accusations if they just recorded the sales calls, or even recorded just one side of the sales calls (to avoid recording the other person - Skype extensions can do this easily enough).

I'm sure Yelp has rules about saying the wrong thing, but "promising what you can't deliver" is almost the definition of sales pitch, and you weren't there long enough to break into the inner circle. All the successful salesmen know a few rainmaker phrases that are very effective at closing the deal.

You may be right, but I doubt it. I've worked in a few cold call centers and the mentality was always a hard sales mentality, which is that the ends justify the means.

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