From first call through close, personality and MAP are major components of sales, but people change and customer contacts move on, often leaving a dormant account. Should you shift an account with potential, especially one that has bought before, to another salesperson?

I don’t believe any company can afford to lose business because of personality differences. So, when it’s the company’s financial health at stake, I really don’t think you have a choice.

Actually, how you do it is of far greater import than whether you do it. You want it to be a winning situation for everybody, not a censure of the “guilty party.”

The first action is to make it company policy that once an account has been dormant for X time it goes into a pool from which other salespeople can take it. The policy needs to apply equally to everybody—exceptions can only lead to bad feelings within your sales team. (If your true goal is to “encourage” someone to resign, there are better approaches that can minimize the detrimental side effects of turnover.)

The best way to make this work is to change the mindset of losing to one of winning, but, above all, the process must be fair, not just in perception, but, in fact.

Start by discussing it with your entire sales team, and use their input to determine metrics for what constitutes “dormant.” These metrics should be universal and apply to both the current account holder and for the new holder. For example, depending on how you define your pipeline, one approach would be to say that if it’s out of the pipeline for X months it’s dormant.

It also pays to incentivize the sales people to let go sooner and in a positive way. Positive, because even if the account isn’t actively producing revenue that salesperson is likely to have valuable intelligence on the three Ps—players, policies and politics—of the account that would benefit the new holder.

By far, the best way to achieve a truly positive handoff is through vested self-interest. Create a viable financial incentive, based on the first sale, to encourage the handoff. Strengthen their interest by adding a small accelerator if the account yields a sale in X time.

Be sure not to take that incentive money out of the usual sales commission. If you do, it will act as a disincentive to the new rep and slow down, or even defeat, your main purpose—to generate revenue from dormant (dead) accounts.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Business info, Compensation, Culture, Motivation, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.