Why You Should Have Separate Sales and Customer Support Teams

The more sales your salespeople make, the more money your company makes. Thus, the better you can manage their time to ensure they do more selling, the better your bottom line.

Key takeaways: 

• Assigning customer support to your sales team may seem like getting twice the value.
• In reality, it’s two different roles and the overlap could negatively impact your sales.
• Salespeople do not necessarily make great customer support agents. 
• It may be better and cheaper to solicit the services of experts in this domain.
• You may need to train your customer support team to get the best results.

As CEO or founder of your company, you get many “bright” ideas on how to mine as much value from your employees as you can. These ideas might include rolling the responsibilities of two departments into one. You might think about asking your sales team to handle customer support in addition to their sales duties to maximize productivity and profit, for example. 

This could seem like a good idea, too, because salespeople could invest time, energy, and resources into forging ongoing relationships with existing customers and unlock new business opportunities – rather than solely focusing on bringing in new business. You could be thinking that in helping and supporting the customer, your sales team could eventually mine those relationships for further value.

Your mind would probably also be reaching for the attractive option of getting twice the value from the same set of people while still serving customers. It would be a bad idea, however  – and it could cost both your sales team and the company. 

Why have different sales and customer support teams 

There are several reasons your company would be worse off if you asked your sales team to take up customer support roles. Here are just a few of them:

• It’s a lose-lose scenario
  Good salespeople are hard to find. The last thing you want is take all that talent and reduce their opportunity to put their skills into practice. Merging sales and customer support would mean your sales team  has to choose between closing and selling, since they would spend more and more time servicing new clients they bring in.
  
  There would be opportunities for upsells, of course, but those would generally be less than the original sales. Your sales team could eventually end up doing a lot of things – but not selling.

• Time value of money

  Imagine you have a salesperson who creates $7,000 an hour in revenue for your company when he makes a sale and $2,000 an hour in revenue when serving existing accounts and pushing the occasional upsell. It’s immediately clear that selling is a more lucrative use of this individual’s time than customer support.
  
  We’ve already seen that asking this individual to take up customer support in addition to sales would land him in a position where he spends his time in support, not sales. This translates to a less valuable use of his time, and problems later on if you pay your team based on commissions earned by winning new business. Both the company and salesperson lose out, and your clients may lose as well if the individual isn’t particularly good at customer support.

• “Cheap” and “free” usually end up being expensive

  Merging your sales and customer support departments make sense before implementation. Asking one set of people to do two jobs would mean you don’t have to hire a second group and spend money paying their salaries and other things, after all. This thinking is short-sighted, though, because you can hire people who are great at customer service, love building long-term relationships, and are good at it to handle support, and you would end up paying them only a fraction of what you would be paying top salespersons for the same work. 

The need for training

Salespeople are great at fishing out opportunities to make sales. Customer support teams usually don’t like to sell and hardly take the time to learn since it’s never explicitly part of the job description, but they make customers feel important. They are distinct, but important roles – and they need experts in them to keep your team strong.

You can do better than passing on support work to your sales team. You want to alter the language used in the support department. The team in charge should focus on “helping” rather than “selling,” for example, and that will help them move to the right mindset to do what’s required. You could also train the customer department to spot the most common and easily handled customer problems to identify opportunities while working with clients. The salespeople could take over at that point to handle negotiations for the upsell.

The right training means you could leave everybody operating where their strengths are best put to use and their returns could easily be maximized.

Turn to the experts for help

Staffing a top-performing sales team is hard work. It’s difficult to find, interview, and train top talent, and it’s even harder to ensure they’re all working at their best and succeeding in their roles. 

That’s were MetaGrowth Ventures comes in. Our team helps businesses break through to the next level by providing the tools necessary for building and training world class sales teams. That includes hiring the best recruits for your open positions, training them to meet and exceed your expectations, and tracking their progress to ensure they’re doing everything they can to help you grow your business.