In this episode we explore the many ways your sales team can be undermining your business, your service team, and letting down your customers. Why do some sales staff overpromise leaving the company forced to underdeliver? Whose fault is it? How can you get a handle on making sure sales and service are on the same page?
For detailed show notes, Justin Varuzzo's after thoughts on each episode, and lists you can use to take immediate action in your business, check out the website at http://www.marketingandservice.com.
In this episode we explore the many ways your sales team can be undermining your business, your service team, and letting down your customers. Why do some sales staff overpromise leaving the company forced to underdeliver? Whose fault is it? How can you get a handle on making sure sales and service are on the same page?
For detailed show notes, Justin Varuzzo's after thoughts on each episode, and lists you can use to take immediate action in your business, check out the website at http://www.marketingandservice.com.
Check one, two.
Speaker 2:So the top sales person closed the deal, but over promised and now you're in a rut where you can't deliver is your sales staff, undermining the rest of your company. That, and more coming up on the marketing and service.com podcast.
Speaker 1:[inaudible]
Speaker 2:Hey Justin, Bruzzo here from marketing and service.com podcast. Thanks for listening today. We are going to talk about how sales teams can undermine service teams or undermine your business entirely. Now, if you haven't listened already, I previously did an episode about how service teams can easily undermine a business and undermine a sales team. So I thought it was only fair to flip the equation because it is also possible for this to work. The other way around where sales teams are undermining the service team. Now, in this example, I'm saying sales is undermining service, but when I'm really trying to say is that if you have any salesperson that is making a promise or a commitment or stating a feature or benefit of a product or service that is not accurate, this undermines everything that your company is trying to do. Now in a lot of typical situations, there's usually a service team that would install the product or onboard a customer or train a customer on a new service. And this is usually when it is discovered that there has been some promises made that cannot be fulfilled. Obviously this creates a very negative customer experience. It usually requires escalation up a team and can waste a lot of people's time in the process. So as usual, I would like to share a specific story. That's occurred with me where a sales team over promised, and then the company was unable to deliver. And it created an incredibly frustrating experience. I won't mention the name of the company, but let's just say they are a global corporation that provides postage and mailing services. At the time, we were looking for a solution for folding and stuffing envelopes for sales, flyers, and or billing for this particular project, folding and stuffing envelopes by hand was simply no longer an option. It was becoming overwhelming. So I was off to do some research and found that there were really two solutions to the problem you could outsource the entire print and mail job to another company, or you could actually purchase equipment that would fold seal and stuff and stamp envelopes for you. Attaining pricing and information on the outsourcing of the entire project was fairly straight forward. And most of the prices were all in line with one another. And we had a good expectation of what that was going to involve. However, when you are purchasing machinery to do these things, there's really not a whole lot of options out there. So we were relegated to meeting with only one or two different organizations that could provide the, that we needed for the project we were working on. We had a difficult time even finding a local representative for the smaller of the two companies that we were working with. So we ultimately ended up meeting with the sales staff of the bigger company, the sales person at this company. It was fantastic. They were organized, they were on time and we had some great discussions. They took a lot of time to seriously vet exactly what we were doing and what we needed to accomplish, what our current rates were. And they wanted to ensure that the product we received would have a positive return on investment. This is a long-term commitment. It was a lease that would last anywhere from three to five years. So it was important. Whatever equipment we leased would take us through the three to five year life cycle, depending on which options we decided to go with after a few weeks of analyzing our needs and what our current costs were, we were presented with the proposal that had the equipment that we would need, and of course, a significant savings to us and increase in the professionalism of how these mail pieces were assembled and delivered and because of the barcoding and some of the advanced features, we had the opportunity to also save quite a significant amount of money on postage. So this all looked fantastic. And after a few weeks of discussion, we decided to move forward with this project. The sales team was sensitive to the fact that we had an upcoming mailing and providing a nice touch of service, the salesperson inquired as if we would want to borrow a machine to get us through that first mailing. And they something they would be able to get to us within a few days. And it would not be the same model of what we were originally getting, but it was something they had as a demonstration unit that they were happy to loan us for a few weeks until our real equipment came. And best of all, there was no charge for this. So we were quite pleased and we received the equipment and underwent our first mailing, which went fairly smooth and we were happy. And now we were excited at the prospect of receiving the new equipment. So you can imagine a few months later, once everything was set in stone and it was time to do another mailing project, we found that we just could not get the mail to be assembled properly. And we're really having a difficult time trying to figure out what was wrong with the machine or what was not working properly. Ultimately, we learned that the machine that we had would not do the one thing that we really needed it to do. And here's where everything started to go downhill. After a month of arguing and debating the company finally agreed to swap out our new equipment with used equipment of a level beyond what we had originally leased, but would do it at the same rate since it was used equipment for us, it really didn't matter. The bottom line was we needed the equipment to do the job that we needed to do, but this was still a huge battle to get the appropriate equipment that we were originally promised would do the things that we needed it to do. In fact, the company made a huge point of even asking for every possible mailing we would do exactly as to how we would do it because they wanted to test everything that we did with the paper we use, the envelopes, we use the inserts we use to ensure that everything would work with the machine flawlessly, which made a lot of sense with such a big investment. They would want to make sure their customers got the best level of service. But what I found suspicious was that all of this supposedly testing had occurred yet. The machine we got was unable to do those, which made me think that maybe that was all just a facade to make it look like they cared a little bit more than they really did. So to make a long story short, the replacement equipment that received was pretty bad. It was always problematic. Virtually every time we did a mailing, we had to call support and it got to the point where we had to call support preemptively before any mailing, because they would have to be there to monitor the machine and make repairs as we would go along on literally every single mailing, this was a complete disaster. What was supposed to be saving us money ended up costing far more as four or five of us at a time would be huddled around this machine, trying to figure out how to clear an envelope jam. And after exhausting, every single resource, and about three years into our lease, we demanded the equipment be removed and that we be released from that lease. Otherwise it was a situation where we would really have been forced to take legal action. It took months to finally resolve the issue. We were let out of the lease and they took the equipment back and move to outsourcing the mail, which was a much, much better experience, which we really should have done in the first place. So as a bonus tip, if you ever have large mail projects, just outsource it, pay the premium, it's worth it. You don't want to spend a fortune trying to do it in house. Not to mention the biggest surprise of this whole experience was when three weeks after we signed the contracts, I got a piece of physical mail in my office where I was labeled the mail room manager. I have no mail room experience. We don't have a mail room and I certainly never signed up to be the mail room manager, but it was a job that I did with pride for nearly three years before getting out of that. So that's one example where a sales person over promised they closed the deal, but in the end, I will never do business with that company. Again, in any capacity, the experience was absolutely horrific. Another thing that we see often is things with like extended warranties. For example, you might see these on cars, you see them on electronics that are everywhere because they're huge profit generators for companies. The problem with them is that you purchase them and then it may be six or seven months later, maybe even two years later that you actually have an issue and need to make a claim. And then you are denied that claim for one reason or another, but you don't understand why because the sales person, you purchase the warranty from promise you that all of these things would be covered with no questions asked and here in lies, the problem warranty sales usually have a huge commissions for the sales staff and this incentivizes sales staff to undermine the rest of the company to put money in their own pocket. And of course, this is only one example of this happening. Let's talk a little about why does this happen? Why do salespeople over promise things that accompany can't deliver? So there's obviously a commission is the most obvious thing. If there's a huge sale ahead and they can close it and they can take a huge check home, they're going to do it. And they might be inclined to make things up or tell little white lies to try to get the deal closed. They might also be experiencing fear. And we're going to talk about sales and fear. In another episode, I have an incredible guests coming up in the next few weeks that we're going to dig into this. And I think you're going to get a lot of insights. So if fear is something that you suffer from in the process, definitely please follow and subscribe to this podcast because we will have an episode coming very soon. That's very special about that. But when a salesperson has a fear, they're going to lose the sale. This is when they start to tend to make things up or to add or attempt to add value to the sale. Even though it's undermining the company because they just want that signature at the bottom so they can get the check and go home. Another reason this happens in a lot of sales jobs is because quite honestly, a lot of sales jobs are short-term employment prospects for people. I'd mentioned a previous episode about car dealerships. They have a huge turnover rates for their employees. Many people who get into the car dealer business. Usually don't get into car sales because it's a lifelong passion. Sometimes they do. And sometimes they're very good at it and they make great careers for themselves in the automotive industry. If it's something they take very seriously and work hard at, but for some people, sales at an auto dealership is a transient job. They know they're not going to be there long. So they're incentivized to do anything they can do and say anything you'd say to close the sale because they know long-term, it doesn't matter for them because by the time you come back with a complaint or to buy another car, they will have already moved on to another job in another career. In essence, a short-term employment prospect is simply not looking to build long-term relationships. Another issue is product knowledge, laziness. In some instance, this is a sales staff just doesn't honestly know what the equipment or the service or the product is capable of or not capable of. They may not be lying about a product or a service. They might just be incompetent about it. And we're going to get into that in a second. There might be a few reasons why that is an issue. One other thing that's pretty common is a sales person is kind of forced into shoehorning, a product or a service into your budget requirements of a customer. So maybe a customer says, Hey, this is my budget. And they know that the appropriate tool or equipment or product or service is not really going to fit within that budget. So they'll offer the product that does fit within the budget, but it's not quite going to do the things that the customer needs it to do. But the hope is that with the long implementation process or expensive onboarding clients might just settle. And then hopefully later on when they realized the benefit of the product to go and upgrade to the appropriate thing. But again, now you are really sacrificing trust, which is the whole purpose of this podcast is to build long-term relationships through trust. So one thing we have to ask is whose fault is it? I mean, are all salespeople just scum? They're all looking to just nickel and dime. Not really. I don't believe that at all. I think there's a few areas that we can look at and try to figure out what's going wrong and why there's an incredible book called extreme ownership. It's by Jocko, Willink and Leif Babin. They were two Navy seals who detail about their experiences overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan and the things that they learned as Navy seals about leadership and taking ownership for the problems you have and the challenges that occur in short, the extreme ownership strategy is that everything is your fault. If you are the owner of the company, it's your fault. If you are the salesperson, it's your fault, no matter who it is, it is ultimately your fault when something is going wrong. If you have a sales staff that is perpetually over promising, and you're running a company that's under delivering, that's your fault. If you're a sales manager and you have a sales staff that is over promising, that is your fault. As the sales manager, there's something you're doing wrong. That's permitting them and allowing them to over promise things that the company simply cannot deliver. One example of how you might be enabling this behavior would be something like not having customer focus goals that are aligned throughout the organization. You might be listening to saying, yeah, I know how important the customer journey is. I know that every touch point a customer has, has to be excellent and that we should always strive to exceed the expectations every step of the way. But perhaps you have not ingrained this into the heads of everyone else in the organization. And if you haven't, you can't blame them for cutting corners to try to close the sale. Another problem, which in my background in computers and software happens a lot is that there's just not great documentation for the service. So sales staff doesn't even have a resource that they can go to to make sure that the service can do or not do something that they're promising. And again, this puts the fault to someone else as the leader of the sales team or the leader of the company or the head of that software project, you need to ensure that everything is documented. So the sales staff has the ability to sell the product accurately. So if you're looking for instant action items, something you can do right now, you want to make sure that your sales team is onboard with the directives that your business is customer service driven. And again, I say you're a business. You might be the business owner. You might be the marketing manager. You might be a sales manager. You might be a customer service manager, or you might work in any one of those fields, but you want to make sure that the directives and the goals of the organization revolve around growing and building long term customer relationships and that everybody is on board with that process and with those goals. And with those objectives, a lack of communication between service teams and sales teams is often a cause for these discrepancies, I would encourage if you have regular sales meetings, invite someone from the service team, maybe not the entire service team, maybe it's just the head service manager, or maybe you pick one person in each meeting that can come and join in with the sales team. So everyone can be unified and make sure that what the sales team is selling is something that the service team can actually deliver. Of course, product training is huge. You want to ensure that the sales staff really knows the products or service, the benefits and the limitations of each and every product. And this is something that unfortunately I see a lot of salespeople are just lazy and they don't want to take the time at home or in their time to learn everything they can about the product or service, which you end up with a sales team. That's not very confident. And in that lack of confidence, not only are they going to struggle to sell things, but they're probably going to sell things that your company can't deliver, or they're going to over promise things just to close the sale, to meet a quota. The reality is you don't want to promise you don't have, this is just good advice in general, if you are buying something or selling something, if you hear the words coming soon, or this is a feature that's expected shortly, or that, that cool thing is currently in development run, don't sell it if you don't have it. Now I have no, I break this rule all the time. I try to say, I'm not going to drop names of companies, especially in a negative light. Uh, there's one company in particular that I've, I've discussed a few times on this podcast in a very positive light. So I don't mind saying this, but HubSpot is a great customer relationship management tool, and I have no affiliation with them, but I do use it. And they did a great job. And the value of the things that they give away is really incredible. And, and it's really great. Uh, the downside is if you actually have to move into the feature set where you pay, you're gonna pay a lot more than some other companies considering whether or not HubSpot was something that I wanted paid services from, to me, something that was incredibly important for a service team was to have access to customer service tickets on the road. You know, if you have an organization with any type of service staff, whether they're on the road, whether they're in the office, they should have access to those tickets and customer information, wherever they are. And as a management team, you might want to have access to your customer information wherever you are, but at the time, and as of right now, HubSpot does not offer any type of mobile ticketing solution. What's shocking is if you go to their website, they have promises back to about four or five years ago where they said that this was coming soon, expected shortly and currently in development. And this is exactly what I was told when we were considering purchasing a HubSpot subscription. My question was, we need mobile ticketing. This is essential for customer service. When's it happening? And I was told, Oh, it's coming soon. It's expected very shortly. And it's currently in development. Fortunately, we did not sign up at that time. And now three years later, those features are still not available that we need. And I have to admit, I'm a little frustrated by the experience now with that said, there are some incredible things that if you don't have a mobile service team or a place where you have reps out on the road, then I, you know, this, this doesn't apply. HubSpot has some incredible stuff. It's worth every penny. If it's going to help you, you got to do that analysis for yourself, but it is a great product, but this was just a situation where the sales staff is not being entirely truthful. And again, I don't know if they're just making that up to close the sale, or maybe they've been told in every sales training meeting that this is currently in development and engineers are pushing it off, or they can't get it together. Whatever the case may be, though, if you don't have it in hand, you shouldn't be selling it to a client by doing so you're essentially lying. And it literally destroys trust in your organization that you're looking to build trust in. You want to build these long trustworthy relationships. If you lie to a client and tell them something's coming, that's not coming. Or even if you say it's coming because you think it's coming and then it doesn't happen. You create an environment of disappointment, not to mention that this might get a new sale, but you could forget about renewables in the future. It also creates damaged reputation. Especially if someone goes on with the negative PR that go on a form that you go on social media, they could leave a one-star review. There's so many ways that when you hurt a customer like this, you can turn around and leave unfavorable reviews, damage to your company's reputation. This is why it's so important to get the sales staff in line with what your product or service can deliver. I just want to jump into a couple of things that might help with this topic. There's actually an opportunity here. If you have a product or service and you have a customer who's looking for something specific that you can't deliver, this is a great opportunity to upsell a custom solution, which can actually boost your sales. It can increase sales volume. It could be a huge generator of new revenue to a company. It could potentially be a profit windfall, but at the, at least you may have a client who is willing to pay you to develop something that chances are other clients will need, that you could later sell as an upgrade. So sales staff should really be in tune with listening to what the customer is asking for, because if they have several people asking for the same thing, and it's not something that you have, maybe it's something you should get. Whether it's something you can buy to sell as a product, or whether it's something you need to develop from scratch, or if it's a software solution or a feature to software, you already have whatever the case may be. If your customer is asking for something and you can't deliver it, the question should B, can we deliver it? And is this customer willing to, to pay for us to develop this in a lot of ways, that's a dream come true, who wouldn't love for a customer to say, Hey, I'll fund your entire business, all your research and development and all your beta testing, I'll do it all because I so desperately need a solution to this particular problem. Most companies would jump on that opportunity. And again, this means that you need to have good communication with sales staff and the sales staff needs to be have having good communication with a service staff or an engineering staff, because the bottom line is everybody is really part of the marketing department. And everybody has a role in every customer journey touch point. So the next time a customer asks for something and you know, you can't deliver it, think about what would it take to deliver it. And maybe that's the proposal you could offer to that customer at that time, building a strong long-term relationship and building a new product line for yourself. Now, the last thing I'm going to leave us with is I do get concerned because you don't want to necessarily under promise and over deliver. I say this reluctantly, because it's not necessarily a bad thing to under promise and over deliver. If you have a customer who is, has certain expectations that you've set and now you blow past them, of course the customer is going to be happy. You're going to get the work done on time, and you're going to build a great relationship, but there's some risks to that. One of them is the competitive risk. If you promise exactly what your company can do and what exactly can be delivered. And then you have another competitor who is fudging things a little bit, or telling those little white lies to try to take it the extra mile, think about the gap between what you are accurately promising and accurately delivering versus what the competitor is over promising and going to under-deliver. I don't know what that gap is. Well, let's just say in a, in a made-up scale that the value of the person who's lying is 15% better than, or 20% better than your honest value. You're within a margin now where maybe you could do something to convince this customer that even though this other company might be able to pull off this thing, that's a little bit better that you are more established. You have a better reputation, you're more focused on customer service. You're more focused on the customer journey and you're going to make absolutely certain that they have the best possible experience they can have. And they're not going to get that from your competition, but if you're under promising and you're training your sales staff to under promise and over deliver, now, what you've done is you've just widened that gap significantly. If the company that was making things up is now only in reality, 15 or 20% better on paper. Uh, but you have now under promise 20% of what you can actually deliver. Now, you've got a 40% gap to fill between you and a potential competitor at this point, reputation and long-term relationships. It's probably not going to cut it when there's that much money at stake, depending on what it is you do. So think about that before you go and tell your sales staff, listen, we want to under promise everything and then we want to over deliver it. That can be a risky strategy, especially when it is a competitive landscape. Now on the plus side, of course, again, if you do under promise and you do over deliver the customers you do have are going to love you. You're going to be a hero for them. Everyone likes things to get done in a shorter amount of time than they expect at a price that was lower than they expected. But by under promising, it can also just create lower expectations all around and just kind of bring down a whole company instead of rising up to the challenges when under a tight deadline or trying to develop something very special. So I think what I would say is you want to accurately promise and over-deliver always accurately promise over deliver. That's a little more realistic. You're going to keep that gap narrow between you and your competition. And you're never going to let down your customer. Now, of course, in every business and in every environment, there's always sometimes something that can go wrong. And ultimately a sales person can be 100% honest, 100% committed, a hundred percent on product knowledge and a hundred percent on their promise to the customer. But yet for one reason or another, you are now unable to fulfill that promise. And the only insight that I can really provide here is that communication is the key. If expectations fail to be met, communication is always the key. Although it feels like we live in a cold world. Most people are understanding. Most people understand that mistakes happen and most people appreciate honesty, especially if this is something that doesn't happen often, if you are constantly failing to meet expectations, you need to reevaluate the business strategy. Because now again, you've created an environment where your sales staff, you're allowing them to perpetually over promise and you're always failing to deliver. And that's a different situation than what we're going to find ourselves in right now in accurately promise project and you under deliver on it. There are some things that you can do to try to make better. And the most important of those things really is communication. Why isn't the project been delivered? Why is it taking longer than expected? And how are you going to compensate that customer for this pitfall? And this should be a daily update as to what's going on. Maybe hourly. Again, it depends on how important, how urgent of a project. This was how important that deadline was, but communication is key. The worst thing you can do is say, I, now I'm scared to talk to the client because we're a day late or we're two days later, Oh my God, three days past the deadline. I haven't talked to the client yet. I don't even know what I'm going to say. Just keep the communication channel open every time there's any updates, anything at all, Hey, we're working on this. We're so sorry. Things happen. People will appreciate that. And people will value that. Just try not to take advantage of it and don't do it too often. I hope this episode has been helpful to you. And if it has, you can certainly find all the show notes and action items@marketingandservice.com. That's marketing and service.com. My name is Justin Bruzzo, I'm your host. And I would really appreciate if you could take a moment to subscribe or follow this podcast on Apple podcasts, Google, Spotify, anywhere you consume your podcasts. It helps us so much. If you could take a moment to subscribe or follow, and it would really mean the world to me, if you could take a moment to leave a review and let me know what you think of what we're discussing. You're also invited to join our private Facebook group marketing and service.com podcast Facebook group, which the link is on our website, which of course is marketing and service.com. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see on the next one,
Speaker 1:[inaudible].