Happy Saturday everyone!
We made it through another week of the grind and not we are to Saturday. Unfortunately, some Saturdays still require work whether it be on the house, for your business, or helping your kids with projects that they procrastinated on. More on that in the future… Today I want to focus on a topic of your organization's staff.
Most times I hear excuses inside of organizations that support staff think they don’t have to be sales people. I’m not a sales person so why should I be trying to sell to people that I need to interact with. Granted there are sales people that will really work to move the potential customers forward on projects, but the first line of some companies are interacting with current and potential customers a great deal more than the sales person.
Service staff at customers contact your company’s service team for questions and answers to their problems frequently. They are looking for service bulletins, part numbers, warranty questions, etc. They are stressed from their end customer screaming that they need their product back now and they don’t care if the fact that the item is broke is because they used it as a battering ram during a project. They need the product yesterday.
Your inside staff is the first person typically that talks to the customers to help them get to where they need to go. A bad interaction will likely make the sales person’s job a great deal harder to grow sales. Far to often I have heard people on inside staffs saying well I’m not the sales person and I don’t care what the customer thinks. The issue is that without the sales coming in that person does not have a job.
Internal staff do not have the luxury of telling customers off on the phone and not worrying about how this will affect the overall business. The internal staff should be selling the customer on that your organization is a top notch organization that the customer wants to interact with. Your internal staff is a sales team. Even the shipping and receiving department is selling the customers on top notch service.
A great deal of times the internal team will be having more communication with the customers than that sales person due to the sales person having to manage multiple accounts. Its hard enough that the sales person is juggling a great deal to move all their customers forward. The internal team has conversations and can get great intelligence from the customer that the sales person likely will not be able to receive. They hear more about the needs and opportunities inside your customer’s that need to be relayed to the sales staff. Having the internal staff thinking about how they can grow business within your customer base when they interact with the customers will greatly influence your organizations opportunities in the future.
Building the relationship with the internal staff and the customers is also crucial. Now I am not saying that you bring everyone out, but key internal staff should be able to travel to customers to meet with them to build relationships. I remember bringing one of our internal order entry members and service staff to customers and how that impacted the relationship. The key members were talking to the customer contacts and out of that opened up a new opportunity for our organization that I did not notice in the past. To be fair it derived that we had an online system that allowed for people to order after hours that I did not know there was an issue because the parts department person would tell me everything was fine. When the person talked with my team they mentioned that it would be great if when they ordered at night before the shop finally closed up instead of faxing in an order that would be huge. Yes it was back when we had fax machines being used. I am getting older.
The end result was that our organization actually had set up an ordering system a of couple months prior that I can pushed to the customers, but being that the parts team was busy, they may have forgotten. Having the internal team from my organization there the parts person was showed the system and very pleased. The parts team also gave us great intelligence that lead to a business deal between our organization and another organization that ended up being pretty profitable business for us. I would like to pride myself that I would have been able to identify that opportunity in the future, but who knows how long that would have taken for me to find out. Maybe one day when it was extremely hot outside and the parts ordering team was frustrated with something that they would have told me why my organization was no better than the competitors. Who knows. Bringing the internal team out helped greatly.
I know that with many organizations that not everyone can or should be sent out, but the focus is about when they are interacting with the customers to be polite and focused on how they can help the customer as well as finding out more information to pass along to the sales person. With the abundance of customer relationship management systems out there, organizations are fools if they do not take advantage of something to keep information flowing.
Make sure to consistently invest in your staff to train them on products and services that your organization invests in and two or three benefits they would meet for customers. Also make sure that the internal staff is focused on being polite. Emotional intelligence is a great training to go through with your team to keep the interactions pleasant and focused on helping the customer even if the customers are being rude.
Everyone at your organization is selling why your organization is the best option for the customers and potential customers. Make sure they are equipped and using the tools you have available. Your sales team and customers will appreciate the extra step as well as your profits.
That is enough for now. Enjoy your weekend and remember if you have questions, want to dig deeper, or if you would like to ask about other topics feel free to reach out to me at info@kevinsidebottom.com. Also, you can comment to the blog to keep the conversation going with other readers.
Sincerely,
Kevin Sidebottom
Sales and Leadership Enterprises