A broken piece of the household forced us to entertain a visiting salesperson. It went avoidably badly.
While naming names would be unkind, I’ll leave it with a list of to-do and not-to-do’s for the consideration of future sales folks we encounter. Not that they’d read this ahead of time, but let’s
just imagine.
- If your company is currently too busy to take on new business, under no circumstances ignore a new client’s interest. Make contact, apologize, and perhaps next time it will work out.
- Do be sensitive to a prospective client not wanting to sit through a thirty-minute multimedia presentation on how great the company thinks it is.
- If offering an instant price quote, offer more than three days of thinking time to shop around.
- If offering a price quote, offer to print it so that there is a legal offer on the table, rather than on a fleeting computer screen.
- If refusing to print estimate dollars/terms, don’t “explain” that this is because the quote generation software is proprietary, and the “IT Department” does not let it leave the custody of the sales folks. As if that were requested.
- If a customer says that they will need a little while to gather extra information to evaluate a quote/project, do not harass them by repeatedly interrogating them about where exactly they intend to get that information.
- If there is a possibility of perception of conflict of interest, such as if presenting oneself as a fair sole reviewer of the entire market, acknowledge the conflict outright, do not pretend it does not exist.
- Do not say goodbyes with “I hope to hear from you soon. But I’m pretty sure I won’t.” That is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Just thinkin’. Duh.