Every week, our shipment left on the same day. Every week, someone had to make sure the right things were on it.
Businesses tend to measure sales by what they can count: new customers, signed contracts, revenue. What happens between the signature and the delivery rarely appears in a report. Yet that is where a promise either becomes reality or does not. In many companies, the people who manage that stretch are sales administrators.
I worked for an industrial company that assembled electrical connectors and also resold connectors sourced from partners. Production followed a simple rule: orders were assembled in the order they came in, depending on which components were in stock. Most of the time, that worked well.
One week, it did not. We had three large orders and several smaller ones, all due for the same weekly shipment, and production capacity could not cover everything.
Following the queue would have been fair, but it would not have been the best answer for our customers. The order that arrived first was not necessarily the one a customer needed first.
So before the shipment, I called the customers. I asked what was urgent for their own operations: which items they needed first, and whether a partial delivery would help them keep working. In several cases, it did. A customer who cannot start a line without one component does not care whether the rest arrives on Friday.
With that information, I went to the production team. We looked at what could realistically be assembled that week, given the components available in stock, and agreed on priorities that matched real customer needs. The remaining items followed in later shipments, and every customer knew in advance what to expect.
The result: the critical orders were delivered on time, and no customer cancelled an order.
When a company closes a deal, it agrees to several things at once: a product, a quantity, a price, a delivery date, and the documents that go with it. The sales team negotiates these terms. Someone else has to make sure they are kept.
That is the core of sales administration. A sales administrator checks that the order matches what was agreed, confirms availability and delivery dates, prepares the documents, and passes the right information to the right department at the right time. When something changes, the administrator is usually the first to see it and the one who has to act.
The details are rarely dramatic. A wrong quantity, a missing document or an incorrect delivery address looks like a minor error in an order system. For the customer, it can mean a delayed start, an extra day of work or a difficult conversation with their own client.
This is why I believe the quality of a company’s service depends so heavily on this function. Service quality is not only a matter of friendly communication. It is, to a large extent, the degree to which the terms of each deal are actually kept.
Sales administration is behind-the-scenes work, and it has an unusual feature: when it is done well, nobody notices.
The administrator sits between the sales team, production, logistics and accounting. Each of them has its own priorities and its own deadlines. Sales wants to promise more. Production wants a realistic schedule. Accounting needs correct documents. Logistics needs clear dates. Somebody has to hold these together, and the best outcome is that the customer never learns there was anything to hold together.
The result is a strange kind of professional success. A shipment that arrives on time is not remembered. A problem that was caught before it reached the customer does not appear in any report. The work becomes visible only when it fails.
For managers, this has a practical consequence. If you evaluate the function only by what is visible, you will always undervalue it. A better question is how many problems were solved before the customer ever knew about them.
Winning a customer takes time, effort and resources. Keeping that customer depends on something less visible: whether the company does what it said it would do.
Customers rarely expect a business to be free of problems. Production capacity runs short, components arrive late, plans change. What they remember is how the company handled it: whether they were informed in time, whether their priorities were taken into account, whether the solution was workable for them.
In the situation I described, no customer cancelled an order. I do not think that was because nothing went wrong. It was because the problem was handled in a way that took the customer’s needs into account. That is the real value of sales administration: it turns a moment of risk into a reason to trust the company more.
A company’s promise is made by the people who sell. It is kept, in large part, by the people who administer. The next time a delivery arrives exactly as agreed, it is worth remembering that somebody made sure it did.
Image: depositphotos / Alonesdj
Customers expect quality service. Businesses need to sell and deliver results. I am the link between the two.
