Let me tell you a story. An all too common story. And how it will make your coworkers hate you and your entire staff. Yes, your failure to correct this type of behavior is exactly why everyone else hates you and all of your account execs, inside sales reps, sales operations, and everybody else who ever remotely looks like they work for you. And may well end up hating every sales rep they ever encounter, for life.
The story starts on a public Slack channel at your company, where anyone can bring a question or problem to the tech support team. Everybody in the company is on this channel; everybody sees it, from the CEO on down to the latest intern. First impressions count, right? And since you’re in sales, hell, you’re the executive vice president, right? You know this. You will get attention and follow-up.
“The purchasing manager at my biggest customer just called, and is very upset. They escalated an issue hours ago and haven’t had any response; nothing at all. Can you please take a look and get back to them?”
So now, the entire leadership of the company is looking at this, and everybody in the tech support team is looking at the case details. And a curious fact emerges: there have been no less than a dozen case updates in the past four hours, including one no less than ten minutes before your sales rep pulled the fire alarm. Tech support leadership looks at the case, and seeing all the updates, throws up their hands. Basically, your sales rep has just proven themselves a lazy asshole who can’t be bothered to check the facts before pulling the alarm. That’s the best possible interpretation. Now, who in tech support wants to work with this person again? Not only that, count the dollars that your company spent triaging this non-issue, all because your sales rep, who you trained (or were responsible for training) couldn’t be bothered to actually use the application you pay them to use to verify the customer’s claim that no one from your support team was gettin back to them?
The kind conclusion is that your sales rep was having a bad day, and didn’t do their homework as well as they should, and hey, it won’t happen again. This is how everyone will tend to view this incident the first time.
Now, imagine this rep has done similar things, at least once a day.
Why, we can conclude from that fact that you don’t care, and in fact, are encouraging your reps to step all over anyone, not to do their homework, and to be as loud and noisy in front of as many people as possible. Because you sanction this behavior, or are too busy to correct it, or just don’t care.
You want to earn a reputation as a team player? Then discipline the stupid, lazy ass shits who can’t be bothered to check the facts. And do so in a noisy, public way so that everyone can see you mean it.
Coffee and Fury 