I gave my sales person an inbound lead about 3 months ago. At the time he worked it for about a week then never followed up again. This week the customer randomly called me (the owner) to place an order and told me that he wants to deal with me. I paid my salesperson a commission on the order and promised to pay him if this customer orders that type of product again in the future.
My question is if I sell the customer a different type of product now that they’ve become “my customer”, should I also be paying my salesperson a commission for that?
I don’t want my salesperson to feel salty of screwed over if they find out the customer buys other types but I also feel like I inherited the customer by no choosing of my own. Maybe it’s best to have an honest conversation with the salesperson now?
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It falls back to whatever your rules of engagement or commission rules say. If they don’t exist, time to make some. They don’t need to be complicated and aren’t going to cover 100% of every weird scenario that might come up.
I’d sit down with the salesperson and see where this one fell through the cracks. Did he just simply not call them, were they mis qualified, or did he simply have too many other higher priorities. Use these situations to improve the process. At the end of the day one commission isn’t going to make or break you but not having a good sales process and well trained sales people will.
Recently, as a customer, I had a similar request that I thought the director handled well. During our second call, the director kindly emphasized my importance as a client. He explained that, due to his extensive responsibilities, the account managers are more suited for handling ongoing needs. He assured me of his availability for critical issues and suggested keeping him in the loop via email. He pointed out that the sales team has more immediate access to metrics, response times, SLAs, and knowledge bases, which are essential for a long-term partnership. He offered to connect me with another team member if my current contact wasn’t meeting my needs, but he expressed a preference for maintaining the existing arrangement unless a significant issue arose.
I like this approach. I will probably say something like this in the future
Small business owner here with commissioned salespeople and previously worked in sales for 14 years myself in the same industry (beer). It is a bummer that your salesman couldn’t close it. Were you already questioning their work ethic or sales ability? I do know and deal with customers like yours that like to “deal with the owner only”. I’m fine with it. Some people are like that and talking beer and taking orders is something I enjoy anyways. Could it have been how this specific customer likes to do business and less of your salesman’s inability to close? I send out a weekly email blast to our wholesale customers and get a fair amount or replies with orders. I still pay my salepeople commission on those sales if they’re in their territory. I know they’re out there hustling still and this is just a good way to reward them for their hard work. A happy salesperson tends to be a better salesperson.
I was not questioning the sales ability, but I took a periodic dive into the day to day sales activity and that was disappointing. We are not following the processes that are in place for follow up and lead nurturing. As a result, we did not try to communicate with this customer in almost 3 months.
Prior to this month when sales were continuously up, there was a busy period that took my focus off analyzing our day to day sales functions (calls made, follow up, etc)… I’ll take the lesson learned from that. I should be better managing our sales numbers in both busy times and slow times. I have a habit of taking a closer look into things when it starts to feel slow. This time I uncovered that we were producing a lot of sales with relatively minimal effort.
With your comments giving more context to the situation I have some thoughts:
1.You didn’t “steal” the customer. Many customers go to smaller business because they have been burned in the past and know “small business”=“better, more specialized service”. Many of those customers equate dealing directly with the owner as a comfort blanket.
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You do need to take a couple months or weeks and pinpoint how bridging sales, closing sales, team sales, and lead bonus’s work.
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As you mentioned earlier, your business is doing great and growing. As the owner, you can’t be there for every customer, you’re no longer in individual sales and you need to transition out of that. You simply don’t have enough time to do both properly. What you CAN do is outline what you are available for. For example, instead of fully taking on this client, can you meet with the sales individual and the client to make sure the sales person handles the day to day moving forward?
Final thoughts are that you are transitioning to owning a business that needs you to do different things than being a salesman. You have hired individuals to complete tasks that you do not have time for, and sometimes, that’s a clients day to day needs. Spending 30 minutes to help close a sale so the client feels special is one thing, spending several days/weeks directly serving that client is another. This is a good opportunity for you to train your salesperson on how to handle delicate clients and make them feel just as taken care of as you do.
Your business is growing and getting clients because of YOU. To get your company where you want it to be, you have to make a bunch of little you’s running around making your clients feel the way you make them feel.
Someone in this thread stated “Sound like the salesperson let the ball drop, what else are they dropping?”. I couldn’t disagree more. The salesperson followed up, but couldn’t close. As a business owner, it’s your job to figure out WHY they couldn’t close and then TRAIN them up so they can close. Did the client feel the salesperson didn’t have the authority to make decisions to facilitate their needs? Are your company outlines and training on how sales should follow up with a client not clear or unsuccessful? Is the sales person not using the language you would use to represent your company? Does the sales person not know enough about your product?
Training is the difference. A company that is just the owner just cycling through employees, clients, and contracts while still doing the day to day doesn’t train effectively.
Use this as a training point for your company. Make sure that by the time this sale ends yourself and the salesperson understand why the client wanted to come to you. Not to punish the sales person, but to help bring them up to your level. The goal should be the day to day contact with the client is the salesperson and it should be the clients idea.
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