Trust

I could write a book here about TRUST and the literally hundreds of ways one can build TRUST. I want you to think about how easily TRUST can be eroded if you have not thoroughly prepared your backup person as how to handle your customers when you are absent from your chair.
I had a mentor early on in my sales career who was my sales manager. The worst salesman I have ever met and I avoided taking him to my accounts like he was the plague. The best sales manager I have ever had, however! Like most baseball managers, being a great player does not assure great managerial qualities. Ted Williams was a flop as a manager and was arguably the best hitter in baseball and is enshrined in the Hall of Fame.
Anyway, my manager back in the 70s told me that I should exercise what he called the "alien abduction concept" as far as I how I handled my job. Assume that at any moment I would be abducted by aliens never to return to this planet and that someone would have to take over my job immediately without missing a beat. The point was that he, as my backup, needed to know everything and anything about my accounts and what was going on in same. This was before the computer age so I had to do all of this in writing (I could not type then either!) in the form of sales reports which were done immediately after the call and mailed weekly. BUT there they were on my desk up to date every day. If I was on Venus (my choice if I were an abductee), at least my survivors could mail them in.
You all have an electronic communication tool and if you are not keeping your customer file up to date with all the information necessary, you risk losing the TRUST you have worked so hard to build with your customers.
There are places in there for notes and quotes. Your backup or managers should be able to go into that customer file and act almost as you would in managing the account.
TRUST requires an investment of your time and making sure your backup is as TRUSTWORTHY as you are in your customers eyes is an investment you cannot afford to miss!!!

In our backups we TRUST,
Dan