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Make your sales representative the hero. Always allow your sales force to be the customers’ main contact through successes and more importantly, problems. When problems are resolved, you do not want to waste this goodwill on some unknown employee to your customer. Make sure your assigned salesperson to this company becomes the hero. When you do this, you reaffirm the customer’s concept of this person is the one who gets things done with this company. If you bring in a number of other people the customer does not deal with, it casts doubt on your sales representative and he is the one fetching new sales orders every day.
Do not undercut your sales representative’s perceived value in the eyes of your customer. Make sure the sales personnel keep their individual customers informed and allow them to announce the good news that all is resolved when customers have complained. Do not undercut the value of your sales force. If they are perceived to be worthless, you risk the customer trying to deal with a number of employees, becoming frustrated and then being lost for good. Losing a customer is too costly to ignore given the time and effort to land a new account in the first place. Always make sure to boost your sales people first in the eyes of your buyers.
The hero asks for price increases and new purchase orders. Regardless how good other inside customer service people are, it does no good to have others get this credit other than the assigned salesperson. Remember that no one else in your firm asks and normally gets purchase orders for the company from this buyer so maintain the integrity of this relationship. Boost his importance in the eyes of the buying public. You want him to get the next sales order so let him be the one in charge, at least on the surface.
