Sales people serving the customer?
Clearly, you know what it means for your company to serve your customer. On-time deliveries, competitive prices, reliable service, competent CSRs, etc. But, what do your customers want from your outside sales people? Ask each sales person what it means to serve the customer, and you can
expect to hear a variety of answers. Some define service as picking up purchase orders, others will define it as taking inventory, some will propose that following up on back orders or short shipments is part of it, while others will say that it involves visiting the customer on a predictable basis. That’s the problem. Few companies have any consistent description of what it really means to serve the customer. Generally, sales people are left to figure it out on their
own, create their own definitions, and develop their own standards.
I have yet to meet a sales person who did not believe that he/she provided excellent service to their customers. Every sales person perceives that they are doing a good job. Not once has a sales person taken me off to the side at a
break in a seminar I was teaching, and confide in me, “You know, Dave, I really do a poor job of serving my customers.”
So, on one hand, we have vague and general
definitions of what it means to provide good service to the customer, and on the other, we have the often-inaccurate perceptions of the sales people.
