Thursday, April 8, 2010

Question: Are Sales And Great Service Really The Same Thing? Isn't It All About Meeting Needs?


PART 1

I've been questioned recently about the sales process, and have been thinking a lot about the similarities and differences between Sales and Perfect Service. That is, when a company designs its practices to deliver premier services, what does this practice do for the sales process?

Quality expert Joseph Juran observed, "There should be no reason our familiar principles of quality and process engineering would not work in the sales process." Juran was speaking mostly about efficiency and error-reduction, and many of his metrics are about productivity. But if we substitute the words "Perfect Service" , I believe we can get to a similar conclusion:

"There should be no reason our principles of "Delivering Perfect Service" would not work in the sale process." Further, for those companies who embark on designing a premier service offering, I would emphatically state that it is a requirement to align service and sales practices. One step even further, premier service and sales practices are the same thing!

Sales Training books identify specific steps or stages in a sales process. These generally include the following elements. I am going to group these into three broader categories:

Prospecting
Initial Contact
Application of Initial Fit Criteria

Consultative Approaches
Sales Lead
Need Identification
Proposal

Closing
Negotiation
Closing Deal Transaction

In my next few posts, I am going to examine some of these characteristics.

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