Not too long ago, a sales manager reached out to me with a problem. His top distributor switched sourcing away from him and to a competitor with no warning, no indications, nothing to give him a heads up as to what was about to happen. They had had a long and profitable relationship, and now it was gone. Also gone were his sales and any inkling as to where his distributor moved his products.
In a very similar manner, the owner and president of a small company with a two-person sales team came to work one Monday morning to discover both salespeople had quit and gone to a competitor. While the company knew who their customers were, all the names, emails and phone numbers of the decision makers and influencers of his customers were gone – out the door with the salespeople.
Has this happened to you, or could it? What do you do about it? How do you protect your business?
The last thing a distributor, salesperson or manufacturer’s representative wants to do is give you their customer’s contacts. That is their proprietary information – or so they think. But these are your customers – your company’s customers – and not the salesperson’s or distributor’s customers. To protect your company’s customer and key contact information, you need to have your own tracking mechanism.
While I am sure you will get push back from your folks on this concept, it is hard and fast truth. In a very real sense, you have a fiduciary responsibility to your company to keep current your customers’ contact information and development opportunities.
The common name for this type of a mechanism or system is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
CRMs come in various shapes and sizes – online (in the cloud) or on the hard drive of your server. CRMs can be accessed on laptops, networks, tablets and desktop computers. They can have templates that mirror your unique sales process and integrate shipping, invoicing and sales history. The biggest issue is getting your sales team to login and input data.
Let’s go back to the sales manager from the start of this blog, who sells through distribution. He sent his sales team out, after the horses had already left the barn, to visit the end users of his products to find out how his product was working and which distributor they use. His salespeople then inputted the information into a CRM system.
The next time a distributor moved to another supplier or put the squeeze play on for better pricing, the sales manager redirected the end users to another of his distributors. While the process is not ideal, it is better than being at the mercy of the departing distributor.
So, do you have a system in place to maintain your current customer’s contact information? If not, you are putting your business at risk.
Dave Harman is an associate with Sandler Training. He has over 30 years’ experience in sales and sales management with Fortune 500 companies as well as small, family-owned organizations. He has held positions from sales to senior management with companies such as Conoco/Vista, Amresco and Ohio Awning, and owns his own business. He earned his MBA with a concentration in Marketing from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. You can reach him at [email protected] or (888) 448-2030.
