| Down here in the Southeast Accounts Group, sales support still reports
to sales, but rumour has it that sales support will report to services,
thru the Professional Service Centers, starting July 1. What goes
around, comes around.....
|
| > reports to Digital Services rather than Sales (at long last,
> Humpty Dumpty is put back together). This hasn't happened yet
I worked in both environments: sales support reporting to Services and
sales support reporting to Sales. Though I liked reporting to services
better (I found services management better understands the technical
psyche) I found fewer conflicts of interest when sales support reports
to sales. Services is goaled so heavily on revenue per body, that it
was too easy for them to move a person from a sales campaign to a
consulting campaign. This made it harder to close business. Another
side effect was deterioration in customer relations. In sales support,
the support person is often (not always, but often) the constant in an
account. (I have many accounts where I have been on the account for
five or more years and have seen 3-5 sales people during that time.)
Customers like the consistency.
Services is the organization that de-humanized its people. They
constantly said the customer needed `resources' not people. But the
customer wanted to talk to people. People understand the history of an
account, the problems we have worked together, what makes them tick,
and so on. A resource comes in for a specific task and then leaves.
So, even though there are problems with support reporting to sales (and
I didn't want it to happen initially), that at least from my
experience, it works out much better this way.
I hope the decision is made with some input from a cross section of
field. But, that might be too much to ask. Too many of these
decisions are made by management without consulting the people that
they affect most.
tgc
|