Communicate! For the Love of Sales Communicate!

Imagine.

You are pitching for a multi million dollor/pound/euro deal. You are in the boardroom of your customer. The CEO, CFO and various other boardmembers are in attendance.

You turn on your laptop to start your presentation. You insert your tumbdrive with the presentation on it.

Access denied.

I have to admit to being thankfull that it was not me in that situation.

Unfortunately I took the call from the poor bugger though.

That morning I had been politely informed from the corporate security team that a new security tool had already been pushed to all laptops which locked down functionality in terms of USB/CD-ROM/DVD access.

Salesguy had been in the office and logged on and had the tool had been pushed to his laptop before he went to the customers site.

Bad timing.

So along with this persons issue I had calls that swamped my service desk from all sorts of people who needed access to these devices due to their work.

A simple matter of communication letting us know that this was happening would not have resulted in the loss of a rather large sale.

Using the principles of Release and Change Management would certainly assist in reducing these issues. Needless to say the actual tool was buggy and we had an awful lot of work that needed to be done to recover. Luckily I had a great ICT support team and we managed to get through the issue but not without an awful lot of pain. I mean A LOT OF PAIN.

Its not fun getting chewed out for something that you had no idea about and little to no control over.

Communication is vital.