Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Sales Training

Continued…..

Having realised that as a company they could now no longer continue to offer big discounts, and having secured the money from the investors to create the necessary supports, you could be forgiven for thinking that the intervening years have been paved with success. Suffice to say you would be wrong, because the curse of that first kamikaze year of discounts continues to haunt this particular company ever since. In short there were three aspects of the business that remained broken.

Their Sales-team

As stated earlier the existing sales-team had become accustomed to selling based on price . Unfortunately most couldn’t make the jump to selling the benefits of the products and a nearly new sales-team had to trained and recruited. This cost the company additional money, resources and time. In fact another two years passed before this new team was bedded down.

Their Customers

The relationship with their customers was also broken . Their average customer expected to pay less than they would to a competitor for the same product. Remember this was a problem of their own making because the sales-team had being selling based on price not value. Should a negotiation ensue with a customer, the customer could also use the previous poor levels of support and customer service as a bargaining tool. At a conservative estimate, It took a further year before the customer base was paying the listed prices and lots of their customers were lost to the competition because they refused to pay.

Their Reputation

Given enough time, resource and manpower both the sales-team and the relationship with the customers could be and was eventually fixed. An issue however that refused to go away and remains even to this day is their reputation. While obviously not intentional, the company had creating an initial reputation of being cheap (horrible word). This problem was then confounded because it took them so long to put in place correct backups. Getting a “bad name” in a country as small as Ireland can prove deadly. Once a companies reputation gets damaged, it can take tens of years to recover or as the MD of our case study put it ” OK I admit we made mistakes in the early days but we now have in place great products, great backups and and a top sales-team, why should we have to work so bloody hard to convince prospects, It gets frustrating for everyone “

And his opinion now on offering discounts?

Feck off!

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