It seems self-evident that companies should focus on satisfying their customers. Satisfied customers usually return and buy more. They also tell other people about their experiences. Customers may well pay a premium for the privilege of doing business with a supplier they trust. Hence sales workforce information is an important aspect from any point of transaction. Statistics show that:
COST of Retaining a customer = 1/10th of the COST of finding a new one
Few days before, I was in a meeting with a group of retail managers. We were casually discussing the market scenario. But, our discussion gradually got carried away. It gravitated towards the inability of their workforce of handling all the situations. Two of them complained that their workforce was not delivering a reasonable RPP (Revenue Per Person). This was due to lack of sufficient information towards every product they offer. Also, these managers were not able to take out sufficient amount of time to teach them about every product.
This is when I realized that this was not just the case with those managers. It has been a major failure in retail sector leading to insufficient conversation rate of a customer towards a product.
So what is the solution?
How can we train employees in such a manner that they are always able to reply to customers’ queries at almost any point of time? Or do we really need to train customers for this?
I would say NO, we don’t really always need to invest time to train our workforce. We do not need to provide the info about every commodity that our business deals with. It would be better we get this process done with a trustworthy third party or and a further better case would be to have a “google” for Sales related information. In this approach, Stratbeans Consulting has developed a product which is an application called “Go Sales app”, an online information archive for the sales workforce.
So what does it contain?
This is essentially an employee engagement tool. It contains an indefinite number of answers to all the possible questions. They could be asked by the customers in any business sector. This contains real-time content on sales information. It also allows the user to find information on any subject related to any product or service using its search engine.
Thus Salespeople and managers can seek following benefits from this app:
- Salespeople would be able to reply to the customer’s query regarding the price and features of any product, that too anytime.
- Sales managers will be able to make their customers more satisfied. It can be done by having this sales archive with their workforce and themselves at all times.
- Managers can expect higher revenue per salesperson.
Having this product in the market will definitely improve the market situation. This will be achievable both from the customer perspective as well as will improve the overall efficiency of the sales workforce.