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?
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.