Sales team vs shop-floor staff

Trying to stop myself spiralling downhill with gloom and tiredness. Keep saying to myself that I knew the first three to four weeks this year were going to be rough. 

Ask myself what it is about having builders in one’s house that is just so tiring: is it the dust, the noise, the mess, the lack of exciting basics like hot water or baths, or is it just the enormous challenge of pasting a bright smile on one’s face at an early hour every morning to let them all in, make them endless cups of coffee and keep up a jolly line in social chat with the knowledge that the work load is already piling up?   Meanwhile, the grumble of malcontent that has always existed between production and the sales office threatens to become an exploding volcano. I have always run the place on the basis that every single member of staff is just as valuable as another. That said, having started the business purely as a sales operation, subbing out all manufacturing, no-one is more aware than me that we are a sales-led operation and without them, none of us have jobs.

I am also fully aware that sales folk necessarily have somewhat different personalities to those on the shop floor. Ninety-five per cent of them are gregarious, chatty, and focused entirely on the sales figures they attain, oblivious to the affects of these on others. The combination can often come across as arrogant. Shop-floor workers have their drawbacks too; tendencies to tunnel vision, gloom and doom or high stress, plus a general resentment of criticism. Currently, one appears to have upset the other to the point of formal complaint.     While I am not saying there aren’t justifications within the complaint, I start from what can only be described as an immensely irritated point of view. At this moment in time, I need my energy focused on pushing the business through what can only be described as a tricky patch and on top of that, I need a stable, positive sales force to keep everyone in work. This aggro is not the way I am going to get it.

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