The Customer-Facing Few

Posted On December 13, 2018

Consider what it takes to build an aircraft carrier and put it out to sea. Tens of thousands of contractors crossing multiple disciplines, organisations, states and countries are involved. Another ten thousand or so do the actual construction. About five thousand sailors then sail it out of port. Finally, a handful of pilots take to the sky.

And so the ultimate success of seventy to eighty thousand people depends on these few pilots – the only ones to actually make contact with the targets of the mission.

Your R&D, your production staff, your suppliers, your executives and their staff built this amazing product. But your customer-facing salespeople and engineers are the carrier pilots. They have a delicate task upon which everyone else’s future depends.

And so they can never be too well trained – never too well prepared.

Written by Andrew Betts

Consultant, trainer and coach specialising in client communication practices (inter- and intra-company). As a facilitator, I use training, coaching and mentoring in due measure. I enjoy developing original programs and creating new tools, and begin with the assumption that the people I meet are doing their best in complex circumstances. The rest depends on where they’re starting from and where they want to go. As a sales consultant, I strive to walk the talk, applying the values and beliefs that underpin my facilitation work to the techno-commercial domain. I agree with Frankl about the importance of meaning, and believe that this generally comes from work with and/or for others – human animals are wired that way! For myself, I’ve noticed that when I’m working towards the transmission of knowledge and skills, then I feel the greatest sense of fulfilment/flow. I am also rather attached to the Schutzian notion of truth as a fundamental enabler, and to Isaiah Berlin’s idea of plurality – the complex and unfortunately rather dull opposite of extremism – as a sensible approach to the problems of the world.

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