The frontline employees are faced with many challenges during their average day: meeting installation commitments, maintaining repair intervals, and responding to critical service demands. The list goes on and on.

But, one challenge and question facing the frontline leadership is: Should the Frontline network employees be asked / required to sell as part of their job responsibilities? Let’s take a look at the pros and cons.

Those For
• Employees, when interacting directly with the customer in their home or business, have a great opportunity to identify additional needs the customer might have and offer product solutions to meet those needs.
• Employees are frequently stopped on the street and asked what they are doing; thus providing them an opportunity to talk about their activity and the products they are delivering.
• All employees interact with neighbors, friends, and relatives, so the opportunity presents itself to talk about, and therefore sell, the company’s products.
• Employees can earn substantial points/dollars through sales reward programs to purchase quality merchandise.
• Additional sales generated by employees help the company overall to meet their financial targets.
• Employees who are trained on the products take that knowledge back to their regular job therefore increasing their value to the company.
• Having 10 or 10,000 additional employees helping sell the company’s products creates broader brand awareness.

Those Against
• Frontline employees have enough on their plate so they should not be asked / required to sell.
• Taking the extra time to explain to the customer about the company’s products and services cuts into the employee’s productivity.
• Employees do not want to continue pestering their neighbors, friends, and relatives to buy company products.
• All products are not ubiquitous in deployment, so why should an employee with a lesser “product footprint” have the same target as an employee with more products available to sell.
• Employees do not feel comfortable approaching a customer when they do not have a working knowledge of the products.
• Product names and promotions change so often, it is hard to keep up with the latest pricing and offers.
• Employees work hard to develop the sales referral only to have no one follow up to close out the sale. So, why try?

What do you think? Should Frontline network employees be asked / required to sell their company's products?

Byron retired as a senior manager of AT&T with more than 29 years of service and now is an Independent Consultant in Telecom Operations. During the last 12 years of his career, he held the position of Vice President - Construction and Engineering for AT&T West. Reach Byron at byron-mc@att.net.