Ask yourself… Who owns your customers? Where do your employees work? Are prospects even being called back? Management often don’t know. All because we allow some of our sales team members to do it their way. You’re feeding into their problem.
I’m asking you to ‘Just Say No’ to…
1) Letting salespeople use their own personal email addresses when responding back to customers.
2) Allowing salespeople to make all of their (so-called) follow-up calls to happen from their phones.
A prospect submits an inquiry into your store… not directly to your salesperson. So do not allow your team to respond back from their own personal @aol, @msn, @yahoo, @hotmail accounts when contacting the customer. You are a business. Act like one and require your employees to use company-only email. It helps with the branding and it clears up confusion for the customer. Moreover, it ensures you and your software are retaining the customer in your system.
And stop letting your salespeople convince you that they’re making their outbound calls from their cell phones. It’s BS. It shouldn’t be allowed. They are likely lying about the amount of calls, but in the rare case they are not, it is still disconnecting the customer from the corporate brand. While I know that the employees own the relationship, the company owns the customers. If a customer isn’t answering calls made from the store’s phones, I’m fine with your team making a call attempt or two from their own cell phones, just not all calls.
These two problems are really just lazy employees’ drugs of choice. It’s called “because it is easier for me” and they spike it into their veins every time they choose to do it their way. Step in. Get involved. Call an intervention. And break this bad habit cycle before it affects the inner-workings of the organization as a whole.
