John Linton
.....in business communications sales processes? Perhaps the 'inducting' and subsequent training of sales people by communications companies has omitted a few basic facts or perhaps ethics are no longer either a word or a state of mind known to some communications companies sales personnel?
I, completely inadvertently, 'came across' some correspondence between a major Australian carrier's business sales "business solution specialist" (it must be hard to have such a grandiloquent sounding title and be unable to write commercial grade English language sentences) and one of the carrier's smaller customers. Now I understood from the individual's name that English was quite possibly not his/her first language but it was so far from what would be expected from even today's semi illiterate English NSW high school HSC standards as to truly surprise me that such people, almost certainly highly intelligent and skilled in other ways, should have been deemed to be suitable to write business communications to current and possible future customers.
I was particularly interested in a long, rambling and atrociously ungrammatical, badly misspelled and appallingly constructed rubbishing of Exetel in which the rep was providing information to the carrier's customer to replace the astronomically high priced service that the customer was already using and the even higher price service the carrier was suggesting the customer should replace it with. Interestingly the carrier's "business consultant" included a statement to the effect that the more expensive replacement service "would be much more reliable than the [current service provided by the carrier] - I don't think I've ever seen something like that before in a selling cycle.
The carrier's "business consultant" left nothing to the customer's imagination in giving his opinions on how inadequate Exetel was as a company and how inadequate the infrastructure it used was "their services run across the public internet" was one of the lesser denigrations). Apart from totally vilifying Exetel in the most obviously false ways he didn't stop there. He included his personal experiences of working for two of Exetel's infrastructure providers in the most derogatory of terms effectively claiming they had nothing to offer to business customers and often lied to customers about their capabilities.
It isn't any sort of a problem (the fact that I "came across" the documentation is a fairly clear indication of what the carrier's customer thought of its veracity) but it was helpful in understanding that in 2009 such terribly written cr** can be written by the sales employee of a major Australian carrier. I think I would terminate the employment of an Exetel sales person who would be stupid enough to write anti-competitor rubbish like that - but that could never happen because we don't hire sales people who can't use written English correctly in the first place and none of them would ever be stupid enough to write stupid lies that can be refuted, categorically by the customer themselves.
I have only given it more consideration than getting mild amusement at the thought that a large Australian carrier can employ such people because I did wonder whether this was an aberration or whether it represented the wider hiring policies of communication companies in 2009. Personally, I have to think it's an aberration or, more likely, some highly skilled engineer who is a recent migrant to Australia temporarily filling a semi-sales role while the sales person responsible for the account is on holidays/sick/being educated/whatever and completely misunderstanding what he/she would be allowed to say/write and why silly outright lies are a bit of a problem in most Australian business environments.
As we are embarking on a program to build a 'corporate' sales force from 'scratch it was a timely reminder of just how careful you have to be in what you 'teach' your sales people about presenting solutions and how not to 'trash' possible competitors other than to provide public record 'facts and figures' should they be relevant to any particular situation. It isn't a difficult thing to do and if it is 'taught' early in a sales person's career it should never be a problem for the individual or for the company who employs them. I thought the "knocking the opposition" school of sales sleaze died out some time in the later years of the last century but perhaps I'm wrong. As someone who has been involved in sales operations for practically the whole of my working life I can't think of a situation over the past four decades of 'knocking the opposition' ever worked but I can recall dozens where it completely 'backfired'.
Being an 'old fashioned' type of company we don't think sales people should speak or write anything that will lessen their chances of making a 'sale' - and number one on that 'list' is NOT making any comment about any competitor. To support that view we are trying desperately hard to provide our new sales trainees with as much documentation as possible to base their written and verbal approaches to prospective customers on - something that we are currently not as successful as we should be at this stage but something that will continue to get more attention. Fortunately we don't have to spend the time and money on teaching them to speak and write acceptable English.
One day we will find the 'perfect' method of teaching new employees how to sell communications services more quickly than we have been able to do to date. One very positive sign is that the first intake of Exetel sales trainees have exceeded the results of any intake program I have been associated with in the past and I have always thought I had been associated with two or three of the best business sales forces in Australia. We are about to embark upon the second phase of that program and I will ensure that there is a more prominent re-inforcement of how not to speak about competitors.
PS: ...and so it came to the obvious conclusion earlier today (10/6/09) - the customer dumped their current provider and ordered from Exetel and recommended to several of his friends in other companies buying the same carrier's same service that they should do the same. It never pays to 'knock' a competitor.