30 October 2009

By Eric Larson, Senior Consultant, Twist Marketing

Every company has one. The trick is to find it and snuff it out.

One of the golden rules of sales is “Don’t make your problem your customer’s problem”. Here is a classic example:

I took my son to the movies a while back. Movie theatres now have arcade games, and my son wanted to play air hockey. The game only took tokens, so I bought five bucks worth from a machine.

We inserted the first dollar’s worth of tokens only to find out the air hockey game was broken. Since neither of us wanted to play any other games at this theatre (and since many of the other games were also broken) I went to the ticket counter to return the tokens.

I was informed by both the staff and the manager that the video games were not operated by the theatre, and they couldn’t deal with any problems related to them. They did give me another dollar worth of tokens, however, in an attempt to resolve the issue.

I gave the tokens to a family that looked like they would appreciate them, resolved never to play the games again, and was left with a poor overall theatre experience.

I’ve illustrated this “Sales Prevention Department” for a number of reasons:

1. The arcade game company uses tokens to deal with the core business problem of money being stolen out of the games by its staff. This isn’t my problem, but I’m being forced to deal with the company’s solution to it.
2. The theatre operator’s reputation and customers’ experience with their venue is being negatively impacted by their business relationship with the arcade game company.
3. The arcade game company’s use of tokens creates a downward pressure on its revenue streams that it cannot assess. This company cannot see customers getting mad and deal with the problem. Customers simply stop spending money, which eventually results in poor game maintenance and further lost revenue. This is a business that is slowly dying.

As businesses mature, they need to develop tactics that protect their interests. There will always be reasons to practice prudence, so I’m not saying forget about diligence. However, keep in mind that customers generally flock to companies that make it easy to do business with them.

There is never one place in all organizations where the Sales Prevention Department works. It has dark ops team throughout the organization. I have seen them clandestinely working in accounting, sales, purchasing, engineering, human resources and others departments. The general rule is if a department has people or computers in it, it might be contributing to the problem.
In other words, the decisions made anywhere in a company can have a negative—and entirely preventable—effect on sales.

The Twist: In many cases, the Sales Prevention Department can be eliminated by some creative thinking once you know where it’s hiding, and usually for little or no cost. Unfortunately, most sales teams just learn to live with it, either by trying to shield the customer from it or accepting it as a “cost of doing business”. Usually, you need an outsider who can ignore personalities and politics to work with your sales team to root out the Sales Prevention Department’s operatives and get revenues back to where they should be.

For more marketing articles, please visit www.twistmarketing.com/resources