What should sales managers being doing when they are not with customers trying to secure new business? 

Making appointments to see new customers or chasing up opportunities with current customers. But sales staff often get dragged into other meetings with customers that have little to do with new opportunities. Let me give you an example. A customer buys some equipment from your company. It's installed by a third party, an electrical contractor for example. The contractor gives a cursory glance to the instructions, completes the install, checks that everything is working and leaves.

Your customer then starts to use the newly installed equipment to find it is not doing all the things he expected. So he calls the sales manager of your company and explains the problem. The sales manager suspects that something went wrong during installation or commissioning. He now visits the site to check and sort out the problem. Of course this results in a delay before the customer has the equipment working properly as well as the time and costs of sending a sales manager or perhaps a support engineer to the installation site. While this visit may help keep the customer happy the sales managers’ time would have been better spent landing the next opportunity.

Now imagine you had a video that explained the common problems with installation and commissioning. When the sales manager receives the call from the unhappy client he sends the customer a link to the short video. The customer can see exactly what he needs to do. The equipment is fixed straight away and it’s a win win all round. The customer has a working product and the sales manager has only spent a few minutes directing the client to the video link. He hasn’t wasted much time and he didn’t make a trip to the customer and he can get on with developing new opportunities.

Here is a an example of a typical how to video. 

A common problem I see with photos taken on a mobile phone is when there is a bright background (like a window or some bright lights) behind the subject. The phone’s camera is exposing the photo for the overall brightness of the scene, and the consequence is that the subject ends up dark or under exposed.  

However if you touch the screen of the phone where you see the subject it brings up a yellow box. The phone now adjust the exposure for what is inside the yellow box. If you are still not happy you can adjust it to make it brighter by sliding your finger up the screen near to the sun symbol. If you want it darker you do the opposite and slide it down.

Now you have the subject properly exposed, and you get the photo you wanted.

Could you use some “how to” style videos save your sales staff a lot of time and allow them to get on with developing new business. If so, lets talk - give me a call on 07557 780336.