Everyone in a business is involved in selling. Most of them just don’t have “sales” anywhere near their job title, so nobody has ever mentioned it.
Take the receptionist. A poor attitude on the front desk makes a visitor less likely to do business with you. A receptionist who understands the difference they can make to whether that visitor wants to do business does the opposite. Same desk, same person, very different result.
Or the delivery driver. One who’s short with a customer puts the relationship at risk. One who knows they’re part of the sales effort looks out for opportunities and reports them back.
You can go round every role the same way. Accounts, the engineer on site, whoever answers the phone. Each of them can help win business and keep customers for longer, or do the opposite, whether they realise it or not.
Why it gets missed
In a business with a sales team and a marketing function, selling gets thought of as their job. Everyone else is busy doing theirs. That’s rarely neglect. It’s responsibility stopping at the edge of a department.
The result is that a good part of the customer’s experience is shaped by people who haven’t been told they’re part of the sale, haven’t been shown what good looks like, and haven’t been thanked when they got it right.
It also needs to be specific. “Be friendly to customers” isn’t a responsibility. “When a customer mentions a problem we could solve, tell their account manager the same day” is.
Three questions are worth asking yourself:
- Is everyone who deals with customers clear about their part in selling, and do they know what to do?
- When did they last have any training on it, or a book to read, or someone in to help?
- When did you last recognise someone without “sales” in their job title for what they contributed to a sale?
What gets in the way
When I raise this with business owners, cost is often the first thing that comes up. It’s a fair thing to weigh, so weigh it properly. If the people who deal with your customers were better at it, what would that be worth over twelve months? If it’s more than the training costs, it’s paid for itself. If you can’t put a figure on it, ask whoever’s doing the training to put a guarantee behind it.
Time is the other one. Anyone who has contact with customers is a selling resource, and it doesn’t usually take much extra time. It’s mostly doing the same things in a different way.
Experience isn’t the same as training
The sales team gets overlooked too. Plenty of businesses employ salespeople and assume they’ll keep improving simply by doing the job every day.
I was once told, “He’s my best salesman, he’s got 12 years’ experience.” I asked whether that was twelve useful years, or one day’s experience repeated 2,880 times. Without time to stop, reflect and learn, repeating something doesn’t make you better at it. Often it leads to sloppiness, boredom and poorer results.
Even strong performers need motivation and training, and in my experience it’s one of the best returns on investment there is.
Take Action!
Write down everyone in the business who has contact with a customer or a prospect, before or after the sale. Next to each name, write one line on what they do that helps win or keep a customer. If you can’t, or they couldn’t, you’ve found the gap.
Pick the group where it’s widest. Decide how they’ll learn their part (training, coaching, a book, or just a proper conversation), who’s arranging it and by when, and put the first step in the diary this week.
