Why do your sales figures start dwindling shortly after a key salesperson departs?
A customer will continue to buy from your company, with or without the help of a salesperson, if they perceive your brand as valuable.
A brand serves as a mental shortcut for customers, streamlining their decision-making based on four crucial attributes: Uniqueness, Relevance, Consistency, and Emotional Engagement. These four pillars of branding should be embedded in all aspects of your marketing strategy, encompassing Product, Place, Promotion, and Price.
If the absence of a salesperson leads to an immediate sales decline, it might indicate that your company’s branding was predominantly strong at the point of sale, rather than across all four Ps of your marketing strategy. In this scenario, brand advocacy efforts may have primarily centered on your salesperson being unique, relevant, consistent, and emotionally engaging, rather than your product or service. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to make sales.
The real question then becomes how that specific salesperson interacted with your customers during their tenure, rather than what they did post-departure.
If your product, chosen promotional channels, offered promotions, and pricing were indeed unique, relevant, consistent, and emotionally engaging, the absence of the salesperson should have minimal impact on your sales figures.
However, if your key sales personnel were expected to compensate for the brand’s deficiencies through their personal competence, losing them may result in losing that market altogether. In this case, both your product and the brand effectively become that key sales employee and not what you physically hold.
So, what’s the next step? You have several options, but some may prove more challenging than others. You can search for another branded salesperson, start anew with different clients and potentially repeat the same mistake, or, if you’re up for it, embark on the arduous journey of building your brand from scratch.
Rehiring the departed sales personnel is often the least advisable option, given the damage to rapport and relationships. Relationships are cultivated for growth, not for patching up.
A Common Pitfall in Sales Management
A common practice to cut down on New Business Development (NBD) expenses is hiring experienced salespeople with a decade or more of market knowledge and established clientele.
Here’s an example of the typical qualifications for a sales vacancy advertisement:
*** Qualifications ***
University Qualifications: BSc
Previous Experience: At least 10 years’ experience as a sales engineer in an Industrial Automation Company
Other Skills: Self-Motivated
What’s wrong with this common practice, you might ask? It’s widely known that many sales employment contracts include a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), stipulating that product, market, and client information must remain confidential for five or more years after the employee leaves the company. What’s left of a business if a salesperson takes their clients and pricing details to a competitor? It’s akin to sending your Chief Technology Officer to the competition and shutting the shop for good.
The second issue with this practice is that it disrupts the market. Here’s why: Mr. X, with a decade of relevant experience and a loyal client base, joins your salesforce. He returns to his established clients with your improved offer and secures the deal. What follows is no surprise to anyone who has spent even six months in sales: the buyer allocates 20% of their existing requirements to Mr. X for the initial trial order.
Meanwhile, a competitor who has also recruited new sales personnel contacts the same buyer, requesting reorders. In this case, they secure 80% of the requirement if they can match their new rival’s price, sparking a price war. This happens because the required quantity remains constant, but the number of suppliers vying for it has doubled, creating a supply-demand imbalance in favor of the buyer.
Unfortunately, the tragedy doesn’t end there. Mr. X, now aware of the consequences of greed, faults the new company for his perceived mistreatment and reduced commission. He jumps to a third company, introducing yet another supplier into the mix. Many industries have stagnated not due to economic or geopolitical factors but because their leaders fail to recognize that the days of sailing off to discover new countries and continents rich in resources are long gone. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that…
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