We don’t have any sales people here. Zero, Zip, Nada. When you call or email, your connected to a person who can discuss what you need for your website. I know to many this may sound like a strange way to run a business, but it works.
For several years I worked in an business environment that believed it must grow a sales force in order to grow. This is common for a growing business. It’s the path the vast majority take and I’m sure it does work when selling commodity items.
With every sales person we hired, we ran into the same problem: Since they had never worked in design, development marketing or hosting of a website, they could not discuss anything with a client without saying a phrase I came to dread: “I’ll get back to you on that.”
Translation? “I have no clue. I will have to take the information you gave me, talk to someone smarter than me, then bring it back to you, and hopefully, I will not screw it up in between. Please be patient with me while I totally waste your valuable time.”
The result was often a phone call from a customer I had spent years developing a relationship with who would say “please don’t make me talk to that person again.”
So that former business environment just kept right on firing and hiring sales people, beating their heads against a wall, and hoping for a different outcome.
When I started Podomani, one of the ideas I wanted to try was not having any sales people. It’s working better than I could have ever imagined. We’ve cut tons of time off of lead times and sales processes, lowering costs. When you call Podomani, you get a live voice that can help you now. That has lead to better long term relationships with our clients, and faster turn-arounds on projects.
Do you know of other companies that practice the “no-saleperson” philosophy? If so, I would love to hear about it.
