Top Salespeople Taking Your Clients? Win Control with Business Telecom

In Season 5, Episode 24 of NBC’s The Office, Dwight Schrute—the comedy’s socially awkward, yet exceptionally competent paper salesperson—attempts to stop his former boss, the bumbling Michael Scott, from stealing clients from Dunder Mifflin, the show’s fictional paper distribution company. After quitting his job as Regional Manager of Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton, Pennsylvania branch, Michael decides to start his own paper company, setting up an office in a small closet (complete with a desk, fax machine, and business telecom system) in the same building of Scranton Business Park. And, surprisingly, things are going well for the newly formed Michael Scott Paper Company. Following some shenanigans involving Dwight and Michael, the smaller paper company is able to poach one of Dunder Mifflin’s biggest clients, forcing the larger paper company to take their competition seriously.

Though portrayed in a hilarious manner in the show, this is a problem that many business owners have. After you’ve invested hours of training —maybe years—into one of your salespeople, they walk out the door to go work for a competitor. Because your former employee is the primary channel through which your customer communicates with your business, a few of your customers will inevitably follow them if they leave. They have each other’s contact information, so it’s easy.

Take real estate, for example. If you own a real estate business, you probably know this problem all too well. Your top selling agents form deep relationships with sellers and property investors. They include their mobile number on their business card and conduct business using their personal number. If they flip to one of your competitors, there goes the link that connects you to those clients.

How to Reclaim Your Customers with Business Telecom

Really, any business that is selling anything and has salespeople on staff will eventually have to deal with this problem. Car dealerships, insurance agencies—even paper companies.

So how do you stop this problem from happening?

There is no one-shot fix that will work one-hundred percent of the time. But business telecom has a solution that could help you minimize the damage. Using a simple admin panel on your VoIP phone system, you can redirect calls from your former employee’s business phone number to go to that of a new salesperson. You might not be able to catch the calls that go directly to your former salesperson’s personal mobile phone. However, using this business telecom trick will help you maintain control over some of the calls that come in. It’s just the edge that you need to prevent many of your clients from walking out the door, too.

If you have yet to implement your VoIP phone service for business, get in touch with us today.

Start owning your client communications. Call nQuery for a free consultation: 305-910-2324