I have recently heard a sales manager saying, “the sales person’s job is to generate customers. If product quality is bad, management will need care of it. Sales representatives should spend less time commenting on product quality.”

If a sales rep is doing many other things apart from selling, it is possible to say that the sales rep isn’t doing his job. However, if many sales representatives are doing this, then perhaps you need more investigation.

While it is true that sales people should commit their effort and time generating sales revenue, that may not be how customers perceive things. Customers want sales people to be “accountable for results”.

Hence, sales staff may make comments, as well as overtures, to help improve quality. In case a company has got a brief history of quality issues such as for example late deliveries, defects or missing parts, the sales staff of such companies will end up spending additional time pacifying customers and taking steps (ranging from making complaints to literally monitor the production process) to make sure quality.

Also, in case a company has problems maintaining consistent quality, or if the product is not really attractive to customers, it’ll adversely affect sales results as well.

So while it really shouldn’t be the work of the sales rep to ensure quality, there are occasions that inputs from sales staff about our product features, service levels and quality standards are invaluable insights of what customers’ expectations are.

If management’s concerns are that if sales staff spends a lot of time on product issues rather than enough on selling, then perhaps management should consider getting operations, engineering or other staff to handle customers’ feedback.

If the operations staff are hiding away from customers, or if there is no one else to address product quality issues, then sales representatives will have to take on the role of “quality inspection”, NOT since they like to do so, but that’s how customers expect them to do so.

CJ Ng may be the trusted sales advisor who’ve helped international companies achieve quantum improvements in sales profits in China and beyond. So far, c.j. has helped:

* Even Mix Improves Product Quality leading international hotel to produce the equivalent of yet another 5,000 room nights in China in the lull summertime of 2007
* A worldwide leading architectural hardware company to improve the sales revenue of an integral account in Shanghai by 10 times within 3 weeks
* The planet leader in PC sales to transform their sales force to become more collaborative and solution-focused, and helping them to regain worldwide pole position from their nearest competitor.