We have a well trained team which communicates amazingly well with the customers. But here is a problem; customer meetings in metro cities is a pain.
Take our salesperson Karan for instance. When he finally reaches the customer’s office, he conducts the discussion and takes it one step forward. By the time the discussion is done, he still has a return journey to cover before he can call it a day. It also means depending on restaurants and dhabas for most of the day meals.
Karan for one, would never admit that this meeting he took so much pain to convert, is losing him because of something this stupid and unavoidable. Well aware of his sales prowess we wouldn’t doubt him either. However, analyzing his MyOperator call summary, here is what we noticed:
1. The conversations during the hours when Karan was on field, took longer than the usual discussion.
2. 1 out of 3 conversations got interrupted due to network or other external interference and had to be resumed later.
3. While Karan believes in taking the requirements accurately and delivering precisely, most of the precision got lost more often when he was on field.
Travel 2 hours to reach a customer, conduct a 2 hour meeting and invest the remaining day in traveling back. What is this person supposed to do, to maintain his work schedule?
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If you find this familiar, and it is hurting your performance and morale, I would first congratulate you on finding the problem. Even though you have your phone and laptop with you, it takes a lot more energy and concentration to keep working with the same verve, when your travel is heavy. You will have that driver to deal with. You will have other cars honking around just when you are trying to reply to your boss. If you are not travelling alone you will have to oblige your colleague by listening to their grumbling and opinions on matters you don’t even care about. But here’s another fact: We found our solution.
We discussed with Karan and did a small experiment for a month. He had to chose to spend his travel time effectively. He chose to listen to music during his journey hours. Here’s what happened: He was handling his calls on the move better already! Also, the meetings now, did not have the burden the journey had endowed. Karan was communicating better. The similar customers, whose 2-3 irrelevant questions or skepticism might have impacted the closing of the deal, are now happy to associate with us.
For anyone like me, reading would be the preferred choice. Since a book in a moving vehicle was not sustainable, I bought an e-reader. But the point is, the time lost in travelling and its drudgery stops being a point at all, if you utilize it for something that keeps you calm. Another colleague of ours’ likes to view old movies on his smartphone.
Cultivating a simple activity like listening to music ensured that he did not carry his external environment in his mind. Consequently, his customer response time and conversation quality became comparable to what he delivered while in office. We didn’t have to wait for the deals to close to be assured that it worked. We could see this in his call statistics measured on MyOperator .
Your sales team might not have this issue and I would be glad to know that. But how do your spot the reason to your sales star’s under-performance?
Since we serve customers across India, most of our business is based on telephone conversations. We believe in supporting our staff to let them deliver their best. What’s your strategy?
