So I do sales for a trucking company. Customers send in requests for transportation needs in the form of an email to our operations team which then gets moved along to the correct department for quoting. Over the past few months now, I have seen that the operations team is taking longer than usual to get quotes sent back to the customer and sometimes doesn't get sent at all. It is not my responsibility to monitor these quotes as I am on the road making calls all day, but I always try my best to stay on top of it. I have brought this problem up in our sales meeting, which the president sits in on as he is a sales guy himself and does maintain some accounts for the company. My suggestion to him was that maybe we need more help in the office being that we are a smaller company and are turning out some decent numbers and are rapidly growing our sales team. I brought it up again in another meeting that it had happened again where a quote was completely missed and the customer had to reach out again to ask where it was. Our president spoke to the operations manager about this simply saying we need to be better. This helped a little bit but then I hit a breaking point. We had taken several hours to get a quote back when it should only take 30-40 minutes MAX and the customer responded saying we would have gotten the sale if we had responded quicker. In frustration I sent this to the president and then he let the operations team really have it. In their defense, a few people were out and one employee was tasked with handling all the quotes for one department. That employee did see the request but misread it and prioritized it to be finished later. I then began receiving emails from our VP and Ops manger pretty much coming at me for going behind their back to the president saying I should have spoke to them first. First thing I did once I saw this was call the employee who this had fallen on and apologize telling him that I wasn't trying to single him out and let him know this was an ongoing problem and relayed the same message to VP and Ops manger. Throughout this ongoing issue, my message has stayed the same in that we just need more hands on the job.
My question to the sales community is am I wrong for going straight to the president with this issue? In the end the president is on my side with this which is all that matters, but I am a team player and don't want anyone in the company to have a problem with me especially those that are higher up.
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