What happens when your sales person overpromises to a customer, and you find that you are unable to deliver?
I have a situation in which a sales person oversells the qualities of a product while refusing to explain clearly the terms and conditions binding to customers. His reason is that “if we tell the customer everything, they won’t buy” (and he loses his commission). So he’d rather oversell.
Which leads to customers getting angry and terminating their relationship with us, when they finally read the fine print.
“My job is to sell right? I’ll let the customer service people deal with it.”
Such thinking is shortsighted.
The sales person doesn’t realise, or care about, the mess he creates in the company’s back end. The fact that – in many companies – sales people are often isolated from logistics, operational and customer service colleagues, only compounds the problem.
It’s a bigger problem than just losing sales. It’s also a credibility and trust issue.
Telling the truth may lose you that sale. But not telling the truth loses you much, much more.
