Answer the Phones - Just Say Yes

New Jersey Division, NJD, had been receiving very high marks for our support of the field sales team for the electronic instrument business for many years. 

There were 17 divisions that shared a sales force.  Competition for attention was intense.  Each division had its own approach.  New product tours were conducted quarterly, and divisions that had products on the tour strived to stand out in some way.  Each host sales office would rate the presentations.

There was also an annual process of polling the sales reps to rate divisions on the day to day support they received.  In the mid-80’s, only a couple of the regions did it, with the Western U.S region giving the most visibility to the results.  NJD had been ranked #1 for several years in a row.  As other regions began to publish similar rankings we again showed up as #1 in most U.S. regions.  Then Europe and Asia joined the mix, with similar results.

I wish I could personally claim some influence for that success.   But it seemed to be something utterly embedded in our division.  It was also a mystery to other divisions, and it was very clear that they thought something must be amiss.  Most viewed themselves as intrinsically of higher stature than our division, and with more glamorous products.  The product part was true, since power supplies tied for 39 out of 40 on a poll of technical appeal.

About 1992, I was asked to share my thoughts at a Marketing Managers meeting on why we were getting such good rankings.  I wasn't entirely sure, though I believed it came down to 2 things and they were very simple.  First, answer the phones; second, just say “yes”.

In the late 1980’s voicemail was becoming popular and many of our divisions were using voice mail to hide behind.  Even the Corporate team leading the voicemail installation featured all the ways you didn’t need to answer the phone when it rang anymore.  The result was that people calling most divisions would get frustrated.  That certainly didn't help their rankings.  The other thing that would happen is that the regional sales engineers who were answering the phones were coached to be very selective about what they would agree to do.  They didn't want to waste the time or the energy of the division.

In New Jersey division we had a different approach.  We believed that it was important to answer the phones directly.  If the regional sales engineer was not available, then a secretary for that Department would answer their phone.  The secretary would offer to help and also take an informative message, not just ‘call back’.  Phone calls were followed up.  That was a big differentiator.  Most of our divisions made field engineers go through some phone tree and often be stuck in voicemail.  Now that concept may be OK when someone who is sitting at a desk calls in and can easily be reached on a return phone call. Yet our salespeople are out in their cars.  Sometimes they are on the street in the rain trying to get a real time answer for a customer. Any delay in answering the phone creates frustrations for people in these circumstances.

The second part, “just say yes” was more difficult for my colleagues to understand. Just say yes. Nothing about that was intuitive. In fact, one of my colleagues blurted out “Bill you can't do that.”  Yet we did that, but with some art to the process. I learned this as I observed our sales engineers on the phone. They would say “yes, I'd be glad to help you with that”, “yes I'd be glad to see if that's possible”, “yes let me get you a quote”, “yes, I can have an answer for you tomorrow, at least a preliminary answer.” Now we couldn't say yes to the exact request in many cases.  Still, rather than our division saying “no” we would make a proposal that we thought was a good business for us to pursue and leave it to the customer to say no if the terms such as price, delivery, or performance specifications were not satisfactory.  We always tried to do it on a good faith basis.

The principle was simply to look for ways to work constructively with a customer. The stories we were hearing from our sales team about interactions with other divisions told us how important it was to work with the salespersons. They're trying to represent our company to the customers.  If they feel stiff-armed it's awkward for them to go back to the customer and say, “I'm sorry our division just doesn't want to work with you.”

Taken together, answering the phones and looking for ways to say “yes” made it a better day for our salespeople when they called us.  That warmth and responsiveness added up.  We never had a goal to get a #1 ranking, just a team value of having each caller feel that we did our best to be helpful.  That spirit produced the good results.