“After We Sell, We Serve.” goes the slogan at Nissan Corporation showroom on Pasong Tamo, Makati City.

This line bugged me all throughout my way to work this morning. Does it mean no sale no service? Shouldn’t service start at your first encounter of a customer? That even if you didn’t make a sell, your customer would at least remember your service and may, in fact, return to do business with you.

What then is the relationship between sales and service? Take a look at the figure below, which I copied from The Quest for Quality: Prescriptions for Service Excellence p. 122.

The figure tells us that before a sale, the relationship is straightforward—salespeople sell and service people serve. Once a sale is made, the relationship gets intertwined. Selling and serving become everyone’s responsibility.

During the transaction of a sale, salespeople often claim that their company is big on service. But usually, after the sale, the sales/service relationships change. Salespeople consider the transaction a done deal, a closed book and move on to another customer.

I think this is what Nissan wants to emphasize in their slogan—that after the sale, quality service becomes even more important. The company’s service continues the sales process and salespeople are important players. Giving quality service consistently and persistently maintain customers. In reality, both sales and service have a significant bearing on future sales.

This is not to say however that the job of selling belongs to the salespeople and the job of serving to service people. Remember that the acquisition and maintenance of customers is a company-wide responsibility. The act of selling belongs to more than just the sales department. Service people can also add value to a service call and dollars to the company’s profits by asking questions to discover sales opportunities.

Let me share with you an incident that illustrates this.

Phil Wexler worked with Souther Bell Advanced Systems to teach new sales and customer service skills to over 300 service technicians. Before the training, additional sales by technicians were averaging a half a million dollars per month. The first month after the training, sales increased by 400% and hit $1.9 million. Sales hovered around that figure for several months until settling at $1.2 million per month.

The key to Southern Bell’s increase was that, after the training, the technicians saw their jobs differently. Not only were they in the customer’s home to repair or install a piece of equipment, they were there to help pay for the level of quality service they were providing. So when a need was uncovered, they either sold the customer small items right out their trucks or, for larger sales, referred them to the sales department.

What’s happening at Southern Bell proves that a company-wide culture of quality customer service definitely affects the company’s bottomline.