Many times we find that the simple things in life, and in business, are among the most important. Sales support, while not always simple, is one of those elements that are too often overlooked in planning service sales and marketing activities in organizations. "Where does a 500-pound gorilla sit?" is an old joke. "Anywhere he wants to" is the answer that follows. Sales support is the 500-pound gorilla of service sales and marketing. It is an activity that carries too much weight and strength to ignore. Without careful planning it will land almost anywhere, and throw its weight around, disrupting schedules and all other work activities.

It really should not be a surprise when this happens. After all, we hire our salespeople because they are persuasive, and expect them to be able to make things happen. Of course, they use their skills on us as well as customers. They also wield the promise of more business very effectively. This provides sales support activities with the tyranny of the urgent. Everything else is swept away by this onslaught. Forget time management—if we don’t solve this sales problem, we will lose the big order!

The Most Common Efficiency Killer
The essence of the solution to this problem is in careful planning. Handling these activities ad hoc is the worst approach. It is just too inefficient. Companies that fail to plan to handle sales support traffic fool themselves. They often have service product managers who spend little time managing service products and almost all of their time responding to sales needs. Sometimes the work victimizes sales and service managers, either in the field or at the regional, country, or headquarters level. This is sort of a camouflaged hole that almost anyone can fall into if the organization does not plan for and control sales support traffic. To put a fine point on the subject, uncontrolled sales support activity is the most common killer of service sales and support efficiencies that we have found in the past 10 years.

Solutions
What do we do, then, with this important activity? We have seen several different approaches that have worked well. The most important factor is that management recognizes the importance of this function and acknowledges that the relatively high volume will require investment in head-count someplace. The two best ways to provide for this are to put resources close to the action or to staff a special sales support function within services marketing.

Sales Support in the Field
It makes a lot of sense to put resources into the field for sales support. Some companies are doing this as part of their direct service selling activity, often at a regional level. Regional or local service sellers are charged to sell to a few major accounts and also to handle a certain amount of sales support. Backing them up with some administrative support (gasp!) helps to prevent overloading them, and administrators are a lot less expensive than salespeople. Those of you suffering with management that practices the ostrich method of planning may wonder if anyone really does this? Absolutely. This is a best practice technique that produces world-class results. Putting resources into the field, close to the action, gets questions answered faster and improves the relationship between sales and service organizations.

Sales Support in Service Marketing
This is another effective way to manage sales traffic. I have seen it routed through service product managers, but that requires a very realistic understanding of the workload involved. It is easy to think that product managers are performing other tasks when they are actually swamped with sales support. It can work, but requires adequate staffing. Once again, administrative help makes perfect sense, but we don’t see enough of it at most companies. Another way is to have a separate sales support organization. Of course, this can be part of the service sales organization, but I prefer it to be part of service marketing. This way, it provides a direct connection with the field for service marketing.

Help Yourself via the Intranet
Another way to help control sales support traffic is with a really good intranet site that provides timely, easy-to-access information for sales reps. This has turned out to be far more important, for most companies, than trying to sell services on the Internet. Publishing information on an intranet site is far less expensive than printing brochures and data sheets, and can be very timely. Often salespeople have tons of information stored in the trunk of their automobile, but never seem to have the most current version. Having access to the right information when and where they want it is very efficient and comforting to a harried salesperson. We strongly recommend use of an intranet.

Return on Investment
This is what we call a "no-brainer." I guarantee that you are spending significant amounts of money on sales support right now. The question is how efficiently are you spending it? Moving from a reactive approach to proactively planning for sales support and investing wisely in administrative help as well as a really good intranet are smart moves that can dramatically improve your efficiency and productivity. While it is difficult to estimate the return on investment, I think that it would easily pay back within a year. In many cases you will realize a 10-to-1 payback, or even more. If you don’t believe me yet, try to figure out where those sales support calls are going now and go talk to those who are handling them. They will convince you, and just acknowledging the problem will make their day

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