Technology Enables The Runaway Sales Force

Companies have long wanted to get a grip on their sales forces.  People who like being in field like being there, in part, because they don't like being in the office.  They don't like managers looking over their shoulders.  They don't like cadence calls or excessive paperwork either.

The best sales people combine good interpersonal skills with deep subject matter expertise - bringing more than just golf skills to the sale.  These people are very valuable.  They understand their own companies.  They understand the sales process.  They understand their clients.  And they are able to work under a high degree of deadline pressure.

But holding on to good sales people is hard.  The same independent spirit that makes them effective on the road, also makes it hard for companies to hold on to them.  And when a good sales person walks out the door, they take their skills and contacts and rolodex with them.

Companies have a long had a variety of methods for trying to get a grip on the pipeline and relationships that sales people bring to the table.  Sales Force Automation systems were designed to vacuum up contact information for buyers.  Company e-mail addresses, phone numbers and cell-phone numbers all contributed to some degree of lock-in.  With the contact information, a company had a decent chance of keeping customer relationships in a transition.

A new generation of web services is making it harder and harder for companies to keep control of that information.  Facebook, Linked-In, Skype, and Google-voice are giving individuals large numbers of ways to keep in touch with clients and maintain their networks - all outside the enterprise control.  Today, it's never been easier for a sales person to walk out the door and take their entire personal network with them.

Is there anything companies can do to combat this trend?  First, they can keep their eye on what makes their organizations a good place to work.  Second, they can build their own links to customers - creating social networks and groups of facebook.  There's risk in that too.  Consumers have long used the web to talk about their purchases.  When enterprise customers start doing so more and more, it will hard to keep comparisons and news of problems from spreading quickly.  This already happens on many online bulletin boards, but it could spread even faster inside enterprise-sponsored social networks with clients.

Free Spirits: Sales People Like to Hit The Road. Photo Flickr CC, ManPikin