I manage an inside sales team. The account executives under me call, email, and occasionally visit small business clients in geographic sales territories. Mostly they work to retain old business and build new business with those clients; sometimes (but not often) they prospect for new customers.
A few months ago, one of my account execs, “Ginger,” got a call (on her cell phone, on the weekend) from a man, “Barry,” who had been referred to her by a client in her territory. Barry was in the process of opening a new business and had set up an account for our services, and he had some questions; once he got going, he would be spending between $100 and $200 on services which both we and our biggest competitor. Ginger did the research to answer his question on her own time. Checking, she saw that Barry had already been assigned to someone else on our team, so she sent me an email letting me know about the opportunity. I sent an email to “Tim,” the account exec to whom Barry had been assigned, telling him to call Barry and do what was necessary to close this account.
A week passes. Ginger gets another call from Barry, who has some more questions. He hasn’t heard from Tim yet. Ginger verifies that she has the right contact information (landline, cell, & email), calls him back on her work line so the call is automatically logged, and answers his question; then she sends another email to Tim with her notes (including the fact that Barry will be ready to start using our service in two weeks and is in negotiations with our biggest competitor) and CCs me on it. I go to Tim in person to tell him to give Barry a call ASAP; he promises to do so.
Another week passes. Ginger gets another call from Barry, who still hasn’t heard from Tim, and who has a proposal from our competitor on his desk. She puts Barry off for a few minutes while she talks to me. Tim is off that day, and I’m pissed at him anyway, so I tell her to put together a counter-proposal. Doing so takes about six hours of her time. The next day (when Tim is back in the office, incidentally) she calls Barry and not only closes the business, but persuades the customer that our services are worth paying more than the competitor was suggesting; in other words, she closes on value, not on price. Barry signs with us and immediately delivers the business he promised. In the meanwhile, I’ve taken his account out of Tim’s territory and placed it in Ginger’s so she gets credit (=commission) for the sale.
That was a month ago. This morning Tim comes into my office to complain about Ginger stealing his customers–specifically Barry. When I point out that both she and I sent him multiple emails about Barry, he claims that he’s too busy to read his emails; he thinks I should have hunted him down when Barry called that last time, or had him present Ginger’s proposal. As it is, he feels – his word – “raped” by both of us.
I did not laugh in his face. I will remember this come evaluation time, though. Idiot.
