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Most salespeople would never admit they have become an order taker.

There are two major drawbacks with being an order taker. One, order takers make less income both in commission and base salary. Two, order takers are easily replaced by customers and employers.

I’ve had times in my sales career when I slipped into being more of an order taker than a consultative sales professional. This can happen when we get busy and put less emphasis on our partnership with our customers. Before we know it, we’re just taking orders.

When the information flow between our customers and us diminishes to just part numbers, quantities and PO numbers we start to look like a generic salesperson. We become a sales commodity instead of a sales resource to our customers. A commodity is something with limited value and is commonly available, not exactly a prescription for high perceived value.

How do we know if we are slipping into the order taking mode? Here’s a short test.

1. Is your correspondence with customers predominately by email?
2. Do you only sell your company’s basic product lines?
3. Do you only have one or two contacts at most of your customers?
4. Are you only aware of your customers’ immediate needs versus their long term projects?
5. Is your knowledge of competitive activity at most of your customers virtually zero?
6. Do your customer records contain limited information and are they disorganized?
7. Do you feel you win the majority of your business on price?
8. Do your customers never or rarely call you with special needs?
9. Do you send out a disproportionately large number of price quotes for the number of orders you write?
10. Are you never or rarely involved with your customers socially?

If you answered “yes” to three or more of the questions above then polish up your customer relationship skills and get back in the game. Go through your customer list one account at a time and consider how you can renew your partnership with each of them. Customers are buying from you because of your personal value to them. Order takers are a dime a dozen.

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Tags: customers

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