Fire the salesperson

Fire the salesperson

Once upon a time, w̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶t̶r̶e̶e̶s̶ ̶w̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶t̶a̶l̶l̶, WebEx, which is, as everyone knows, one of the main players in the web conferencing market, introduced and successfully applied an unusual rule for all of its salespeople. It went as follows:

If a salesperson sent a customer a product presentation, the next day that salesperson was fired

Any salesperson knows that the best way to present your product to a customer is in person

At first glance it is a very strange story. After all, we all know that the purpose of a presentation is to convey the maximum amount of accurate information and to explain things so that they become clearer. So what is the problem? Let us work it out. When you look each other in the eye. When you can feel that the topic has caught the customer’s interest or that, on the contrary, he has got bored and you urgently need to change the direction of the conversation. When you can anticipate his next question and deal with any objection on the spot. When you are simply having a pleasant chat over a cup of coffee. Because, in essence, a salesperson sells himself first and foremost, not his product. If you managed to find an approach to the person, managed to get him interested, managed to make him want to keep talking to you - consider half the job done.

Unfortunately, though, it happens that in-person meetings are impossible. For example, because both sides are busy, or because the customer is a long way from the salesperson. Nobody has cancelled trips out to the customer, of course, but they are too costly in both money and time.
And this is where web conferencing comes to the rescue - the same personal communication, but without having to travel anywhere.

And so the meeting, whether "live" or online, has taken place. At that meeting a competent salesperson conveyed 100% of the necessary information to the customer, of which the customer took in 80% at best - and even then only if his head was not busy with something else during the conversation. Then the customer goes back to his company and passes on some part of that 80% of the information to his colleagues. The colleagues, naturally, take in even less...

By the end of the chain so little real information is left that it is no longer clear what is so good about the product the salesperson is offering, why it should be given preference and so on.

And here, you would think, a presentation could save the situation, but!

Answer honestly, hand on heart: how often do you yourself decide to buy anything at all for your business after watching a presentation? And what if the company is new and not yet very well known on the market?
Exactly. You are more likely to give preference to a well-promoted brand with a global name (even if it costs more and even if it does not meet your needs 100%) than to buy something unknown on the basis of a presentation and the small amount of distorted information your employee managed to convey to you.

A hopeless situation for small, growing companies? Not at all, if, for example, there is a video recording of those very first negotiations between the customer and the salesperson. Of that very online meeting where they talked looking each other in the eye, where the salesperson conveyed all the necessary information about the product to the customer in an accessible form, answered questions and worked with objections. In short, did everything needed to spark interest and make the sale.
And the customer can show this recording to his management so that they, in turn, also get a complete, undistorted picture of the product. Convenient, don’t you agree?

So what is the upshot. Personal communication was and remains the most effective way for a seller and a buyer to interact. But however well that communication goes, by sending the customer a product presentation the salesperson partly shifts the final decision onto him. As if to say, "I have told you everything I knew, now it is up to you".
It is quite another matter when everyone has the chance, even after the fact, to "take part" in that conversation by watching it in a recording. The very least a potential buyer gets in that case is a complete picture of the product.

WebEx solves the issue radically: it fires the salespeople who send presentations to customers.

Whether to fire people or not is up to you, but it is probably still worth giving some thought to more effective solutions. And Zoom has those solutions.