I gave my sales person an inbound lead about 3 months ago. At the time he worked it for about a week then never followed up again. This week the customer randomly called me (the owner) to place an order and told me that he wants to deal with me. I paid my salesperson a commission on the order and promised to pay him if this customer orders that type of product again in the future.
My question is if I sell the customer a different type of product now that they’ve become “my customer”, should I also be paying my salesperson a commission for that?
I don’t want my salesperson to feel salty of screwed over if they find out the customer buys other types but I also feel like I inherited the customer by no choosing of my own. Maybe it’s best to have an honest conversation with the salesperson now?
I was not questioning the sales ability, but I took a periodic dive into the day to day sales activity and that was disappointing. We are not following the processes that are in place for follow up and lead nurturing. As a result, we did not try to communicate with this customer in almost 3 months.
Prior to this month when sales were continuously up, there was a busy period that took my focus off analyzing our day to day sales functions (calls made, follow up, etc)… I’ll take the lesson learned from that. I should be better managing our sales numbers in both busy times and slow times. I have a habit of taking a closer look into things when it starts to feel slow. This time I uncovered that we were producing a lot of sales with relatively minimal effort.