To all folks in the sales arena and to the top leadership of the companies that you work for, I respectfully offer my insights based upon my experience as your collective customer for over 30 years working for many different companies/customers of yours (this is generalized and not a reflection of the particular company that I happen to be working for at this moment).

What is most important to me as your customer is the relationship, the partnership that we have, if you will.

To my primary Account Manager – You are my main line to your company. You are my main contact, my main partner. This is a partnership and not just another new sales opportunity. Turnover is an issue, however, as I seem to get new AM’s much too often..

It is also nothing new in the industry to have different, operational/day to day sales folks on the team that deal with our “maintenance” or “normal” requests, I get that. But, you as the main AM should still be intimately involved and concerned with our day to day needs as well. This should actually be where your main attention should be. This is, after all, the main reason we are doing business with you and your company in the first place. Please don’t divorce yourself from the day to day “nitty gritty” of our needs/issues and solely focus on just developing new business from us, only.

I also don’t want to be pushed to your “portal” for every single thing (sales or support), you are my partner. You should be able to handle these things for me every once in a while. I need help sometimes and don’t always have the time to do all of these things myself. This is not to say that I do not like a portal or self service, I definitely do, I am just saying that the portal should not solely replace the relationship that we have for day to day items.

Another thing, and this is one of the more annoying developments/trends of the last 5-6 years that I have noticed/surmised – Your hiring/use of third party companies to gather leads and them unknowingly contacting existing customers of yours. There is no worse look than when somebody that I am not familiar with contacts me out of the blue from your company (supposedly), trying to sell me services from your company that I already have/use…this is pretty terrible and is just a bad look. These third parties should at least be sent a list of existing customers/services by you that they should not cold call upon being contracted.

Anyhow, mini rant over, I really appreciate you all and your partnership…and I know many of these items are structural and this is why I really aim this more at the top leadership of your respective companies – Just (hopefully) some constructive feedback from one of your long time, collective customers of 30 odd years. Here’s to 30 more!