Is a part of your process killing sales and running off clients?
By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon
Have you ever encountered a “sales prevention department”? Let’s discuss how the sales prevention department’s role works and how you can look for ways to get rid of yours if you have one.
The tale of the register tape
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve watched the adventures of a GoToMeeting administrator. In one case, they were working with a sales person at a competitor to GoTo Meeting. I’ve been a GTM user for a long time, and in the last few months the quality and stability of the service has suffered a bit. I suspect it’s nothing terribly serious but it is a business distraction and it can impact sales if the timing of a stability problem is unfortunate. More on that in a moment.
GTM has a sales prevention department. Here’s how theirs works:
A GTM administrator manages an account with 25 seats of GoToMeeting. The admin’s company wants to add more seats. Can you login and simply add x seats to your license? No. Enter the sales prevention department. You have to call someone, wait for a call back and then deal with the potential of a sales pitch about things you may not want – all to add a few seats. This is a task that would have been completed in two minutes or less on a modern software as a service (SAAS) platform. Instead, it takes as long as a couple of days to complete this simple transaction.
For some services, a consult is necessary before a change of this nature. This isn’t one of them.
In this case, the sales prevention department is introducing unnecessary delays for the client, who only wants to give you more of their money and get more of their people working with your tools. Don’t make this difficult for your clients.
Who else has a sales prevention department?
In the time it took to deal with the process GTM places in front of their users, the GTM admin could have signed up for a competitor’s service and had a day left over…. unless it was with the competitor whose sales team I was dealing with on the GTM admin’s behalf.
The GTM competitor happens to be owned by a fairly large IP phone service that is currently receiving about $2500 a month in service fees from this company. This fact is ignored by the GTM competitor, which puts them at risk of losing not only the GTM-like business, but the IP phone service as well.
This competitor has a free, limited scope service that matches the free limited scope service GTM offers. Premium services (like recording a meeting) are critical to this evaluation, so I asked to have one account turned on for two weeks.
The answer? No, but we could come to your office and do a demo of the premium features.
At this point, the conversation is over. The GTM competitor has made it clear that they really don’t want the business. What they don’t seem to understand is that their handling of this $400 a month sales prospect threatens the $2500 monthly business they already have.
This is the sales prevention department at work.
Do you have one?
You might be wondering if you have a sales prevention department. The best way to learn that is to secret shop the sales line of your business. If you don’t have one, monitor the sales and support emails for a bit. Search them for terms like “upgrade”, “expand”, “merger” and “buyout”. The last two are possible signals that two companies have joined together and they are shopping how to supply your services to “both” companies.
You can also look at your orders for the last few months and randomly choose a few new clients, a few clients who changed the scope/size of their use of your products and services. Call them and ask to speak to whoever made the purchase. Ask them if it was easy to buy from your company. Was any part of this process difficult or frustrating? Do they have any suggestions to make the process easier?
Every time the sales prevention department takes root in your business, it hurts revenue and can cost you clients. People walk away because they don’t want to deal with a company that’s hard to work with. If it’s difficult right off the bat, that’s usually a sign of what’s to come.
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at mriffey@flatheadbeacon.com.