Every month I receive a variety of questions from salespeople and their managers. These come from a variety of sources - my live seminars, the monthly phone seminars, questions that are sent into my newsletter, and issues that arise in the course of my consulting work. Out of all of these, I select those that I think have the most universal application, and respond to them here.
Dave, how can a sales person have a life at night and not be reactive to customers calling at night - seven or eight per night?
I have a hard time imagining why you would need to receive seven or eight calls every night from customers. I think the issue lies in your view of what the job of the salesperson really is, and what strategy best brings success to the salesperson.
A lot of sales people view themselves as merely extensions of the company's customer service operations. In other words, they believe that the reason their customers do business with them is because they (the sales person) bends over backwards to respond to every whim of the customer. These salespeople then inadvertently train their customers to call them with every problem and need they have. Many times, many of these calls and problems could and should have been better directed to the company's customer service representatives.
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This is a common trap that salespeople, particularly new salespeople, fall into. In an effort to fill up their days, to be seen as important to the customer, the salesperson becomes the ultimate lap dog, dutifully chasing after every whim and responding to every request of the customer. That creates a huge list of "things to do" for the sales person, which makes him/her very busy and feeling needed.
However, it is a miserable and unwise way to define and go about your job. The sales person should be seen as a professional consultant to the customer. Someone who cares about the customer's business, who creates and presents creative solutions to the customer's deeper needs.
Questions and issues about back orders, invoice problems, delivery dates, pricing on routine orders, etc. are all more appropriately handled by an inside salesperson or customer service representative.
A sales person does himself no good in the long term by attempting to handle every customer question or issue. As a buyer of goods and services, from my perspective, I wonder how substantial a vendor's business is, and how good a vendor's salesperson is, if I can't get my routine issues taken care of by a customer service representative. If the salesperson has to call back to handle every question, I really wonder about the value of that salesperson.
So, the real issue is how you define your job. Are you a lapdog, responding to every whim of the customer, or are you a professional, capable and wiling to respond to the customer's expressed needs?
Once you resolve your definition of the job and how you want to position yourself, than the answer to the question above becomes clearer. If you want to be the customer's lap dog, than rejoice that you are getting seven or eight calls per night. Gives you something to do, keeps you busy, and makes you feel important.
However, if you view yourself as a professional, than you need to train your customers to take the routine issues to your customer service or inside sales group, and use the time with you for more substantial discussions of their needs and your solutions.
Retrain your customers. Give them your company's 800 number and directions for what kinds of issues to take to the inside staff. Stop answering your phone after 5 PM. You deserve to have a life, too. But you must train your customers to respect that.
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If you have any comments or questions, email them to me. I do, of course, reserve the right to edit.
Here are a few articles by Dave
that you might be interested in reading:
- Strategic Planning for Salespeople... "Ready, shoot, aim." Unfortunately, that's the all too common description of the field salesperson's modus operandi. In a misguided attempt to stay busy and see as many people as possible, too many salespeople subscribe to the theory that any activity is good activity. There was a time when this was true. Customers had more time, sales was a simpler job, and any conversation with a prospect or customer was a good thing. But times have changed, and the job of the salesperson has become much more complex. The pressure on the salesperson to make good decisions about the effective use of his time has never been greater. Salespeople now must confront an overwhelming number of potential "things to do," and that requires them to make decisions about which customers in which to invest their time, to prioritize their activities every day, and to continually choose from a menu of possible activities. In other words, salespeople must now engage in strategic planning.....{Read More}
- Developing Account Strategies...
Our objective is to equip you with an understanding of the principles and processes you'll need in order to develop effective account strategies. First, let's define our terms. Strategy means a series of steps designed to bring your prospect or customer from where they are now to where you want them to be. It's the long-term view. Realistically, it's a planned series of sales calls in which each sales call has a distinctive set of purposes, a distinctive piece of education, a person or set of people to speak with, and a distinctive agreement that you'd like to attain. The purpose, the timing, the organization, and the sequence of that series of sales calls is the strategy. It's the long-term perspective, the big picture, of what you want to do and how you want to do it.....[ {Read More}
There are also many other action-packed articles for sales professionals that offer how-to solutions to every day sales problems that you can read online at www.davekahle.com/article.htm.
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