Every day salespeople and business executives question customer ownership; the seller defends the position that the customer belongs to whoever gets it and the company maintains that it belongs to whoever supplies them, and therefore can dispose of the customers at its discretion.
First of all, it must be clarified that the clients that have value for this controversy are those that are active, therefore, both the seller and the company do not question any ascendancy about the clients who do not buy from the seller or the company. Then it can be thought, with all legitimacy, that such a dispute is far from being serious from the point of view of the exploitation of the market but rather from the point of view of the benefits the client leaves both the company and the seller.
There are extreme cases of sellers who take the customer portfolio to the competition when they change, and over time it is discovered that the company continues to sell despite this and that in many cases the seller cannot reproduce the sales levels that it was. selling at his old company. This happens because the commercial mix of each company is unique and although it can be similar to the naked eye in fact, it is very difficult for it to be the same, since the interaction of the human groups that manage the companies and that make them up produces a mixture of decisions and actions difficult to imitate. That is why projects that are very bad in results for one group of people are very good in results for another group of people: the responsible factor is human motivation.
Why is the customer not the seller's?
Many times the customer ends up abandoning the attention of a seller simply because the service is bad, many stock breaks, erratic pricing policy, etc. are factors that the customer takes into account when deciding to buy from one or another seller. The friendship lasts even when the client is harmed in his economic interests, which is what prevails in the long term in the commercial relationship. Customers buy products and want to receive products at the opportunity, quantity and conditions that they bought. The rest is romance.
Why is the client not from the company?
Of the four Ps that go into the business mix, the Product is the most important. If the company has no product, then it has no customers. Only around a product can commercial strategies, sales policies and customer service policies be designed: if there is no product, there is no customer and there is no business. The rest is only a dream, and as Calderón de la Barca said: »dreams, dreams are…»
Who owns the client?
The customer, basically, belongs to the product. We can develop extraordinary promotional campaigns, have excellent sales positions and very good prices, but if the product is not in the quantity, opportunity and conditions required by customers, there are no customers.
In my capacity as a consultant, I have seen companies that have an excellent sales team, good prices and theoretically very efficient service plans, but they fail in the logistics necessary to place the product with the periodicity, opportunity and conditions of sale that customers require. We should not confuse product problems with service problems, since the type of service to be delivered to customers depends on the nature of the product. If the product is extremely perishable, the sales service should be extremely fast. Example: The newspaper. The demand for outdated news is very limited. If the product is too complex in its operation and eventual failures, you must have a highly qualified technical support available in an expeditious manner.
The customer is loyal to the product in the basic, but over time it can come to depend on the extras that each company necessarily adds to the products it delivers.
One final recommendation
To the company and the seller I recommend not wasting any more time discussing the fallacy of customer ownership.
To the seller: worry about visiting your client and selling him the range of products that the company intends to deliver to the market. Visit your customer frequently and always try to sell to him. It's fine to take orders, but don't become a "beggar salesman": Have you got something for me?
To the company: worry about your supply and dispatch to customers, both activities are the ones that produce the greatest number of problems in customer service and motivate them to buy from the competition. Also worry about the control of sales management; many salespeople are not where the customer and the company want them to be and many salespeople are not developing their work with the effort and drive that the company would like. Make sure your business is not a bridge under which beggar salespeople crawl through life's ups and downs with minimal effort. CÑM.
