In most industrial companies, the service group is an island. The team is in the shop or out in the field. And the interaction the service team has with the sales team is minimal.
But that’s a big missed opportunity.
Your service team has incredible information from its time spent with your customers. They go out and repair valves or pumps or other critical parts, and see and hear about the real challenges your customers are facing. They are talking to decision-makers, and they can get information from them that a salesperson may not be able to because the customer’s guard is down. The customer views that service person as one of them, as someone who tells it like it is.
The information the service person gets should be shared and leveraged with the rest of your team. But most companies aren’t taking advantage of that. The salesperson may see that there was a service ticket. But he doesn’t have the background information on that job.
We need to be training service people to ask sales-related questions, and then have a system and process to take that information back to the outside and inside sales teams. And service people need to be involved in sales meetings when appropriate. They need to feel as if they are part of the team – that they can contribute to growing the business. Train them to always have their antennae up, looking for opportunities.
It all comes back to team selling, a principle I believe in strongly.
Learn more about other areas where you may be missing sales growth opportunities from the sharing and leveraging of information across departments in our recent blog: Why CRM is a Revenue Generator, Not a Cost