Sales is Hard Enough...

If you have a sales team to support, you know this responsibility comes with its own unique challenges. You also know that keeping them focused and productive pays big dividends. Our experience working with diverse companies across a broad set of industries is that the unique challenges often include:

• Availability and attention spans can be limited. This is understandable because most sales people are driven by variable compensation and time really is money.
• They are mobile which means options to assist them can be limited and time is tight.
• Because they are on the move they often queue-up their issues and want to address them all when they request support.
• Business hours are for business and they want support available during what many consider “off-hours.”
• Being mobile the tend to have as many different devices as you can imagine and they all need to work together or at least in sync.
  
• If part of a global team, support in their preferred language can be a plus.

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That is a big list of challenges and it can appear daunting. We at Astadia have found our greatest success supporting sales teams with a few key strategies:

• Dedicate phone numbers or queues to accelerate service
• Availability for call-back appointments to accommodate demanding schedules during broad hours
• Build expertise to support multiple devices and integration of them
• Develop in-depth knowledge of sales tools and applications
• Provide a single source for support, repair, maintenance, replacement, and new purchases
• Employ feedback mechanisms including surveys, outreach, and roundtables to drive continuous process improvement and understand changing needs

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Most of the people we support just want to do their jobs without having to think about the technology they use. Sales people are no different, but they tend to have unique circumstances which are understandable. Astadia’s perspective is that we need to understand the variables for supporting and enabling each role; sales just happens to be a role that typically has more variables.