How Does Your Company Treat It’s Salesforce? To Your Customer, It Means A Lot!
Company A employs a herd of undisciplined, self-entitled, complainers who call themselves sales people. It’s a continual struggle to teach and motivate them. Thankfully, a handful of good ones do what they’re told and manage to carry the rest of the group.
Company B leverages the knowledge, experience, and relationships of it’s sales people. They employee less sales people than Company A simply because their people are more fully engaged. The entire organization understands that, without customers, there are no sales and, without sales people, there are no customers.
As a sales person, which company do YOU want to work for? Today you can find everything from Facebook memes to college textbooks extolling the virtues of gratefulness and having a positive attitude – especially for sales people.
Shouldn’t these concepts also apply to a company’s attitude toward it’s own sales people? Instead, they are continually measured, questioned, and right-sized.
Here are four reasons companies should treat sales people like experts first and allow them to prove their worth second:
Reason 1: Sales people are the face of your company.
To your customers, your sales people ARE your company. They represent both the good and the bad of what your product or service delivers. If that crucial representative lacks the ability to serve the customer, the entire company suffers.
Reason 2: Customers are more inclined to trust people they know.
A sales rep that has proven her value will gain much more insight than any focus group facilitator. Why? Being paid to take part in surveys or focus groups skews the answers of participants. A well-trained, empowered, sales person can ask the right questions when the customer’s guard is down and get better information in return. Customers are often more willing to share their thoughts positive and negative about what the company offers.
Reason 3: Sales people are better able to gain competitive information.
In most of the companies I’ve worked for, Marketing and Sales Management are the last people to find out about what the competition is doing. Why? It’s the sales people who are in customer offices, seeing competitive literature, getting customer feedback on competitors, and even reading their proposals.
Reason 4: Customers buy from sales people.
Did I mention they are the face of the company? In today’s marketplace, customers lack the patience for vendor titles or org charts. Regardless if you are a service rep or CEO, customers want to know the same thing – what you can do for them. They are more likely to give their business to an entry level rep that can answer their questions quickly and throughly than waiting days for someone more important to come in from headquarters. “This person who deals with you on a regular basis has no valuable information or power to help you,” is not the message you want to send to your customers.
If you’re company was a world class athlete, your sales people would be the lungs. Revenue would be the oxygen the lungs take in. Does this make sense or even seem obvious? Instead of celebrating the people who bring life to our companies, we scorn them. We say they’re overpaid. They’re spoiled. They’re demanding. Finding and dealing with customers is never easy. Every sale is a customer choice – not a sales person’s. Taking the sales force for granted is taking the customer for granted. There is no greater example of entitlement than that.
The Solution
Support your sales people. Give them the information the customer needs and the power to get things done. Ask their opinion and listen. Respect what your sales people say about customer feedback instead of dismissing it as negativity. Turn your sales management function into sales enablement. Really, make the change. Make it abundantly clear to EVERYONE in your organization that customers, who fund their paychecks, need sales people!
Sincerely,
Meaning2work
If you’d like to get emails of my posts, please click “Follow” in the menu attached to this page.