Getting employee buy-in for your products and services
Our sales reps are having a difficult time understanding and "believing" in the services they are selling. What impact, if any, does this have on customer trust?

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The answer is something you know already: To get employee buy-in for your products and services, you have to offer great products and services. If your employees can't believe in the product they are selling, then it's going to be very difficult for them to help the customers believe in the product. So one of the most important things to do is to offer nothing but great products, and to help the employees understand how the products can truly help customers improve their lives and improve their businesses (depending on whether it's a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) product or setting).

It's also going to be very important to make sure that the employees understand the value of the offering so that they can talk about it and help customers understand it. One of the things that this implies is that we make sure that our employees are working with a product or service that they can believe in – in other words, what we find difficult is a situation where once employees understand the product, they have difficulty believing in it because they don't believe it's really best for the customers. We have to have products and services that take the customer's point of view and that in the long run are good for our customers and perform for customers in ways that we'd want those services to perform for us if we were the customers. So, offering great products and services is the first step. Then we can start talking to the employees about how to make it happen.

This was first published in October 2008