03/ 30/ 2006
by Jeffrey Moses
When demanding sales quotas are established, salespeople naturally focus on finding new customers and closing sales instead of providing ongoing backup service for existing customers. This can be counterproductive for a small company because long-term growth almost always depends on building customer loyalty. When establishing quotas, managers of small companies should be conscious of the possibility that sales staff may sacrifice customer service to meet immediate sales goals.
Sales-driven companies, however, may find that quotas are an indispensable component in achieving revenue targets. Even so, you shouldn't set sales quotas up in a vacuum. You must coordinate them with other aspects of the overall sales operation.
Sales quotas are most successful when you allocate the responsibilities of sales and customer service to separate departments within the company. When sales staff can sell, and customer service staff can care for customers, the best of both worlds can be achieved. You must establish this clear division of responsibility, however, at the inception of quota periods. If not, customer service is sure to suffer.
Even with a clear division of responsibility, customers tend to gravitate toward sales staff rather than customer-service personnel for follow-up help, such as arranging warranty work, asking questions about products or services purchased, receiving reassurance about purchases (i.e., satisfying buyer’s remorse), etc. Addressing each of these is key to creating long-term, loyal customers. Since customers become familiar with their salesperson during a purchase––and usually come to respect his or her opinion––they may feel slighted when directed to a customer-service person unknown to them. For this reason, you should introduce customer-service personnel during the sales process, so customers feel that a natural progression has taken place when they are directed to someone other than their salesperson.
Setting company-wide, rather than individual, sales goals can encourage a team effort among sales staff. Based on historical sales during certain times of the year and immediate revenue goals, you could present sales quotas or goals to the group as a whole. Meeting these goals would assure that your company’s growth remains on target and would enable individual sales staff to spend at least some time on customer care.
Rather than fire a salesperson simply because he or she does not meet quota, you could consider a broader perspective. Managers could take into account not merely the sales volume during a certain period, but also the amount of time spent on productive customer follow-up. Sales managers could meet individually with their staff, monitoring sales success and reviewing the time spent on customer follow-up. Based on these aspects of sales activity, both of which are important to a company’s long-term success, managers can guide the sales staff toward greater productivity.
