Sales Pilots - Who is flying the plane?

My colleague asked me the other day “Should we undertake eco pilot sales campaigns, for people who don’t take our advice”? My straight answer was “Well they do want to pay us”. Whether that would be a good thing for the customer or ECO1 is debateable.ECO1 is an ethical eco marketing company; so should we just take the money and do what is asked of us? Read on, then tell us what you think we should have done?

In truth, it is a tricky question to answer. It boils down to the question - why employ the services of a professional, then try to tell them what to do? To be fair, I think it generally takes someone with an ego the size of a house, to start a business in the first place (I include myself here).

After all, it is often much easier just to go and work for someone else, without all the worries of Tax, NI, employment legislation, and the list goes on. So it seems like most people start a business because they have such a drive (and an ego) to succeed. So does the fact that we are an eco marketing company make a difference to our ethics?

At some point, every business faces its largest obstacle, making sales. Everyone has heard the story of the man who built the best widget in the world. But let’s face it; if he can’t sell for toffee, then no one will buy his widget. This applies to eco green marketing too - an inventor’s idea may have the potential to “save the World”, but only if the World gets to hear about it properly.

If you come from a successful eco sales and eco marketing background in the first place, then making eco sales should not be a problem. But what about the vast majority of people out there with a great idea, and the determination to win, but in truth are pretty weak when it comes to eco sales and eco marketing?

Sure, you can pop down to a local Business Link, who will often give you some good advice, but they won’t do the job for you. If selling is not your forte, you can read as many useful pamphlets and books as you like – but it isn’t going to transform your business in to a selling machine.

At some point, you need to decide whether you will take on an eco sales person on PAYE or outsource your eco sales. I suppose this is the point where I have to giggle. Very few businesses would fail if they employed a weak accountant or solicitor. Yet how many would succeed if they chose a weak sales person?

What makes me giggle is that so many people place a huge emphasis on choosing a good accountant or solicitor; yet treat sales as if it were an afterthought. How many people sit patiently in the waiting room of a solicitor, as if they were meeting with the Prime Minister for the day? Please don’t misunderstand me; I am not suggesting that financial and legal issues are not important. What I am saying is that if there is no money coming in to a business from sales, then having the best accountant or solicitor in the world will not save the business from ruin.

So this begs the question, why tell a professional eco sales team how to sell? The phone rings with a new customer. We go through a set pattern of asking questions to ascertain whether a pilot eco sales campaign would be of use. We strongly advise customers to take our advice on the best way to conduct a campaign. The customer announces, “We are a breath of fresh air as we know what we are doing”.

Then a few days later, the customer announces that he is in a hurry and has written the sales pitch and the marketing materials himself. He asks if we can start tomorrow, and he wants us to hit the targets he has set himself. So in one fell swoop, the customer has gone from hiring the best to becoming the best himself and telling us what to do.

We take a look at the pitch and try not to utter any expletives. The sales pitch is so long and involved that a customer would get confused. There are so many mixed messages that the aim has been lost. The targets have now been doubled from what was originally discussed. As we go very quiet on the telephone, the customer blurts out “I’ll BACS the money in to your account today”. What should we do?

You see at this point, our new customer has suddenly decided how to run the entire campaign himself. He has based his ideas on what he has learned before. Of course he wasn’t making many sales before using his own ideas – so why are we being asked to follow a path of failure? If this Eco Sales Pilot Campaign goes ahead – Who is flying the plane?

The Green Sales Generator

This entry was posted on 14/06/2007 at 05:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorised. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.