Can CSRs become sellers?

by Dave Kahle

Distributors often want inside salespeople to do some proactive sales activities each day. They want customer service representatives to use some of their time to shift into the proactive mode to make outbound phone contact to existing and new business.

They often ask, how do you get inside sales to be proactive? Answer: You don’t.

It is far easier to refloat the Titanic than it is to get a group of essentially reactive customer service-type personalities to change their mode of operation to make proactive phone calls. That’s because of the personality of the typical inside/customer service person.

Generally, the people who fill these positions are very reactively oriented. If a customer calls them with a problem, they will knock down walls to fix the problem and help the customer. They are great helpers and problem-solvers. That personality characteristic is one of their strengths, and one of the reasons they are good in that job.

However, if you ask them to make 10 phone calls to people who are not expecting the call — proactive calls, in other words — the typical customer service representative will lose sleep the night before worrying about it. And tomorrow, when they are supposed to do this proactive calling, they will discover that the amount of other work they have to do has swollen and crowded out the time they had dedicated to proactive phone calls. They rarely get to it because “other stuff” gets in the way.

So, the first answer to the question of how you get inside sales to become proactive is, “Don’t bother trying.”  You will be swimming against the current, expending great quantities of time and energy trying to make something work that is probably not going to work. You’ll find yourself and your inside salespeople becoming increasingly frustrated. This frustration can spill over into other portions of the job, poisoning an otherwise positive work atmosphere.

Instead, hire someone who can be totally dedicated to proactive work. Keep their job description pure:  no reactive work, only proactive calls.

There is a rule here: When a person has responsibility for both reactive and proactive calls, the reactive will always swell disproportionately, crowding out the proactive.

As an alternative, it is possible that you have one customer service person who is a bit different from the rest, whose personality leads you to believe that he/she might actually enjoy proactive calling. If that’s the case, then consider creating a new job for this person and having him/her do all the proactive work for the department.

Follow these guidelines
Now, it may be that the circumstances of your situation will not allow you to hire a new person or create a new position for an existing employee. If that is the case, then be guided by these guidelines:

1) Make the proactive task extremely specific.
Your directions should not be, “Call 10 people and see if they need anything.”  Instead, the task should be, “From 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. every Tuesday, call the 10 people on the list I give you, and make this 50-word presentation which I have written out for you, word for word.”

The more specific the task, the more likely it is to happen. The more general your direction to them, the more likely that they will find it difficult to follow.

2) Train them in the task.
Don’t expect that they automatically know how to do what you want them to do. Hold a two-hour training session. Have everyone role-play the phone call several times. Identify all the possible responses. Create strategies for each. Get them to memorize the script.

By doing this kind of training, you are accomplishing two things. First, you are improving their skills in the specific tasks you’ve assigned to them, making it more likely they will accomplish it effectively. Second, and maybe even more important, you will have enhanced their confidence in their ability to do this, and altered their self-image in a positive way. If they see themselves as being competent at this, if they really believe they can do this successfully, they will be much more likely to attempt it.

In our “Sales Power for Non-Salespeople” training seminars, for example, we spend much time just working on their self-image, understanding that if they harbor a negative image of their ability to do proactive work, no amount of management intervention will help.

3) Measure and publish their progress.
Keep track of how many calls each person makes, and how successful each call is. Share those numbers with everyone in the group. This adds to the perception that they can, indeed, do this thing that you want them to do, because they see their colleagues doing so successfully.

4) Reward all success.
When someone has a successful call, praise that person in front of everyone. Lavishly reward them for doing what you asked them to do. Success begets success. Make a big deal of every person’s success so they all feel more capable of doing this part of their job.

Transforming essentially reactive customer service people into proactive salespeople is a task that is harder than almost anyone anticipates, and is, in many cases, next to impossible. Typically, managers who want to make this transformation are sales managers who have years of sales experience. To them, making some proactive phone calls is no big deal. Everyone can do it.

That may be true from their perspective, but it is not true from the point-of-view of the customer service representatives who may be asked to do something difficult and threatening for them.

Dave Kahle, called the guru of distributor sales, will lead a presentation entitled “What is the future of the distributor sales force” at 10 a.m. and again at 1 p.m. at the I.D.A./ISMA Fall Convention Nov. 23. For more information, or to contact the author, e-mail , phone or visit www.davekahle.com.

This article originally appeared in the I.D.A./ISMA Fall Convention 2002 issue of Progressive Distributor. Copyright 2002.

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