The Importance in Excellence of Sales Execution      

As a start up, or well really any company, you are only as good as the product or service you offer and that is completely based on the customers perception of your performance.  Sales is an interesting profession because often times you are the one to research, find, pitch, pitch some more, wait some more and close the deal but you are not often involved in the delivery of the product or solution to the customer.  That effort is turned over to Customer Success teams or Product Teams or Installation Partner or someone else like that.  Your success as a sales person and your ability to get referrals or references is completely based on other people executing their job with excellence.

The Execution of the Sale Itself

One of the things that every B2B sales person needs to be congnizant of is what happens post close   – the execution of the sale itself.  The doing or implementation of the product or service sold.  This needs to be done as perfectly as possible and is even more important than the initial close.  It is where the rubber meets the road as they say.  If the team does not deliver here, then the relationship, the upsell, the referral are all in jeopardy.

The Challenge

We had a situation not too long ago where this scenario played out for one of our clients.  In this case, we help our client with large account based sales.  We had qualified a prospect and moved them along to the point where they were willing to participate in a pilot of the product at one of their flagship stores near their headquarters. 

In this scenario, our customer did not have an employee in the area to execute the pilot so we needed to bring in a partner to assist.  The partner had done some work for our client in the past and had done solid work.  We had the partner meet the client, walk through the scope of the pilot and then proceeded to execute it.  The partner told us the work was completed to everyone’s satisfaction.  Sadly, shortly after that we received a call from the client telling us the work was done poorly and sending pictures of the poor workmanship.  The partner agreed to go back and fix it and then do so.  Then unfortunately, the client called and said the fix was still poor.  After that, the client was not interested in proceeding any further having lost confidence in the product being applied.  Tough.

The challenging thing here was that it took over 12 months to acquire the client and build the relationship to a point to do the pilot. If successful, this client has hundred and hundreds of locations across the country where this product could have been deployed.  So through one poor execution, a very large opportunity was lost.

This highlights the fact that when it comes to the post sale work, there needs to be an Excellence of Execution, in the delivery of the product.  As a sales person, try to stay involved as best you can and try to stay engaged in the relationship acting as an advocate for your customer.

Conclusion

Good luck with your sales efforts and meetings.  Happy Hunting!

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The Importance in Excellence of Sales Execution