I was recently chatting with a sales rep for a sizeable company. To protect the guilty, let’s pretend that they sold car paint and related equipment and supplies to auto body shops. He explained how he visits his customers on average every other week and told me that one of his most productive activities was to demonstrate new products during these sales calls, because when he did, his chances of taking an order or increasing the size of an order went up dramatically.

The rest of the conversation went something like this:

Me: “Do your customers know how much they need to order?”
Him: “Sometimes.”
Me: “So, sometimes they ask you for advice? They might ask you how much they ordered of a similar product last month or last quarter, is that right?”
Him: “Yup.”
Me: “Are you able to answer that question for them quickly?”
Him: “Yeah, real quickly. I tell them ‘Hell if I know.’”

I waited for him to laugh and tell me he was joking, but unfortunately (for him and the company that employed him), he wasn’t. I then asked what it would take to get that information and he told me he could run some reports in the office and perform some basic arithmetic, but he really didn’t have time to do all that and make all the customer calls he was supposed to make.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking – big deal, you spoke to a really bad sales rep. Perhaps. Let’s assume that is the case. That isn’t the point. Let’s assume a good sales rep would take the time to do the homework. Now what you’ve done is take a good sales rep out of the field to run analysis rather than meet with their customers – which reduces the time where they can really add value to their customers. You see where I’m going with this? For a sales rep, the value isn’t in running the analysis on the data; it’s in explaining the analysis to your customers. After all, that’s where the data (at the customer level) is truly actionable.

I did speak with other reps at the company and the fact is, the company provided their sales reps with some tools, but in many cases they were the wrong ones (for example the reports he spoke of where he would still need to do some work to give the customer the answer). What are the right tools you ask? The answer is simple, they are the ones that will make your sales reps more effective and more efficient. To borrow a theme from Stephen Covey, the tools should make them more effective when dealing with people and more efficient when dealing with paperwork. Of course, it could be a really cool tool like OrderPad, but in this case maybe a better report from their existing systems would have done the trick.

Oh, and back to the “Hell if I know” – he’d better hope his competitors don’t know either.

ColeConnect and Microsoft have something in common – we both want to make it easy for you to purchase OrderPad. Microsoft Financing allows you to make monthly payments for the software, hardware, and services for your OrderPad solution over a term of 24 to 60 months – usually with no money down, alleviating the need for a big cash investment. To learn more about how the program works, contact us.