Hill on Sales|Information, opinions and more about the Office Products Industry.

This post is a little off my usual topics but I think you will recognize it’s value.  I remember my mother handing me Amy Vanderbilt’s Book of Etquette and told me to learn it if I wanted to present myself as a polished young man when I went out into the world.  I always considered good manners to be ‘expected’ of me as I grew up and I still expect them even though they have nearly disappeared in today’s baggy pants society.  What makes up the classic southern gentleman?  His attire for one thing, but let’s go past those specifics and think about some other traits that are nearly lost.

As a fan of the attire worn back in the 1930′s and ’40′s I wish the hat style of that period were back in vogue.  A man never left his office or home without his hat on.  He didn’t wear it backwards or sideways and it was always neat and matched his suit.  His clothes were always properly pressed and perfectly fit.  He would always tip his hat to the ladies with a polite “Howdy” or “Morning, ma’am.” He would always open the door for the lady and kept her on the far side of the sidewalk when they were out so she wouldn’t be the first to get hit by a vehicle. The gentleman would pull out the chair for the lady to sit and would always stand up if seated when a lady approached the table or his desk.  He was well mannered while eating never opening his mouth when full of food or talking with his mouth full.  His napkin was always properly fashioned in his lap and no matter how bad the meal was he was always complimentary to the lady and cook.  The southern gentleman would offer to carry parcels and packages for the lady and would always, always greet and thank her with a smile.  The southern gentleman is a shameless flirt at all times yet always charming, never demeaning or crude.  The southern lady never took the flirting wrongly and with class and dignity knew how to be gracious but firm.  He knew how and when to send flowers to his lady or his office assistant, or even his client and make the right impression.  The southern gentleman always said thank you…always. 

Why can’t we practice this practical form of good manners today? Do you think people today will think you old fashioned or silly?  Or, do you think you will make a valuable first impression?  Remember, you don’t get a second chance a first impressions.  Perhaps it’s time to remember our southern heritage or perhaps adopt a little southern charm to your own daily practices.  It’s simple things like this that make lasting impressions.  Yes, I still open the door for the ladies and I do send flowers.  (My hobby used to be growing roses) I have walked across the parking lot to help a lady put her purchases in her car and my wife will tell you that I am a shameless flirt.  I love the south!

The last word:  “If you could get up enough courage to begin, you have the courage to succeed.”– David Viscott

I think many sales people would agree with me when I say loyalty is on a steady decline in our marketplace.  I blame it on the current economic conditions primarily.  I hear it day in and day out from sales people about their once loyal customers hammering them on price.  Businesses, in a sour economy especially, always seem to pick on their office supplies to cut costs first.  However, we also know that an account won on price is also lost on price.

So with price being such a big deal how do we avoid it when prospecting for new business?  We don’t.  We just side step it in the beginning. The first skill you must master is effective questioning.  When you finally get that face time with your prospect you ask questions about their current ordering process, the delivery schedule, delivery preferences, shopping/ordering preferences, item subs, toner needs, etc., you get the idea.  When a prospect says something like, “They always leave my deliveries at the front desk and I have to get someone else to take them to my supply closet..” that is a sign of dissatisfaction and should be written down in your notes.  However, you should follow up that statement with something like. “Isn’t that inconvenient?” or “do you really have time for that?” or “have you ever hurt your back doing that kind of stuff?”  You want to identify with your prospects problems, highlight and expand on the problems it creates because you are going to provide a solution, BUT NOT NOW!  You must question effectively NOW and provide your solution later.  You absolutely must resist the urge to enter ‘sales mode’ and solve the problem now.  You are on a fact finding mission  and besides you may find other areas of opportunity during your interview.

Seek out problems and potential areas for improvement first and offer value when you return.  Get a commitment and do not forget to ask for the order!  So many times we offer all the solutions and value but forget to ask for the business.  This, of course, is just a small part of effective questioning and prospecting.  Effective listening is vital to the success of this skill set and I urge you to practice these skills every day.  Role-playing is especially effective when working on these skills.  Each sales meeting should have a dedicated time set aside for role-playing in the group setting.  How often do you practice with your team?

The last word: “Don’t find fault, find a remedy; anybody can complain.”– Henry Ford

The ease with which we communicate to our customer via email, text messaging and other digital forms makes a lot of our customer contact very impersonal.  Of course this is widely accepted in our age but at what cost?  The result is we fail to reach all the potential purchasers and users of the products we sell.  Recent statistics show that 35% of the non-regular purchasers of business products go outside of the normal purchasing channels of their company and submit for reimbursement later.  By avoiding the personal customer interaction we are missing on opportunities to further build and strengthen our relationships within each of our customers/clients offices.  Not to mention keeping an eye out for the stray competitors shipping carton hiding out somewhere in the office.

What’s the remedy?  Sales people need to take the time at least once every six weeks at the most to physically visit the customers office and take time to meet and greet everyone possible so the staff knows who you are and what services and products you provide.  If possible hand out product samples and a business card and let the staff know you are available for product questions and support, presuming this is agreeable with your primary buyer.  On a recent field sales call with one of my reps upon ‘socializing’ with some of the office staff I learned that they were discharging their janitorial crew in favor of doing it with in-house associates.  This information allowed us to open a conversation on providing their JanSan products and dispensers.  The call ended up very productive and we landed a very nice piece of new business that we didn’t have before.  Remind your outside reps of the importance of really knowing your customers and you may find your sales increase and your business solidified.

The last word: “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” Helen Keller

I was fortunate to once again attend United Stationer’s Vision show/event this year held last week in Orlando Florida.  Their previous event was held at the same location last in November 2009 and I must say that in my opinion this show had more attendees than previously.  The location at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resortis a beautiful facility and the grounds and golf course are second to none.  United does a great job on their event and this is the fifth United Stationer’s show I have attended.  I have not had the privilege to attend an SP Richards show so I can’t compare theirs to United’s but I have never been disappointed at the event hosted by United (USSCO).

I spent a lot of time this year speaking to other dealers from around the country and I’m never disappointed with the humble temperment and genuine good-heartedness of most dealers.  One very noticable difference this year was the number of attendees in their 20′s and 30′s.  I’ve thought for many years that our industry didn’t do a very good job of attracting workers in this age group but this year proved me wrong.  I heard very little negativity from dealers regarding the economy and most told me that they have learned to do business on a different scale than in years past.  They are reaching out utilizing different methods than before and don’t fear the big-box competitors.  I think the issues the last few years regarding some of the big-boxes have made many dealers realize that we/they can compete on price and when it comes to service we (independent dealers) blow them out of the water.  I’ll discuss some of the other things I learned during future posts so visit here again in the next week.

My compliments to United Stationers on a great show, excellent seminars, and to our host site for great food and a spotless facility.  Kudos to Hewlett-Packard for their Tuesday night party and to all the vendors for their support and participation which makes the event possible.

What was my biggest take-away from this years event?  Jay Baer and his discussion on social media.  Do you participate in Twitter of Facebook as a business?

The last word: “If you live your life in the past, you waste the life you have to live.” -Jessica Cress

Such is life in sales.  Although the economy seems to be the biggest disappointment, we as sales people are our own biggest challenge.  With gas approaching four dollars a gallon it is easy to make the excuse “I can’t afford to go out and make sales calls”.  But sitting at home making excuses doesn’t bring in any new business, grow your existing business or continue to build your business relationships.  You need to work smarter, get better organized and remain focused on your goals.

Thinking of working smarter, we rolled out to our group not long ago a data mining program that I am truly impressed with.  If I would have had such a program years ago when I was an outside rep it would have made my life and job so much more productive and easier.  After many months of discussion and consideration we added the Sales-i program to our back-end system.  Sales-i sorts and extracts customer and product information from our system we could never access before.  We always knew this information was there but didn’t have a way to extract it, Sales-i does that and much more.  It is more than a usage report, it categorizes the product categories and tells you how much business potential you are getting or missing in each account.  It shows you your margins on products and you can set up alerts that will email you when your customer hasn’t made a recent purchase, or about anything else you can imagine.  If you have a sales team I highly recommend that you take a look at Sales-i.

I would also like to give two thumbs up to our Salels-i trainer, Jeff Gardner from Maximum Performance Group. I had Jeff come to our office for hands-on training for our team and it made a huge difference.  Jeff is more than a trainer, he is also a sales person at heart and understand the challenges the OP sales rep has.  Jeff was a worthy investment and a fine person to have support your team.

There are many opportunities out there as there are challenges to meet them.  Disappointments, well we all have some.  Customers don’t seem to have loyalties much any more, sales people want all the commissions without doing the work, and I still hate selling copy paper.  However, I’m spending more time coaching and field training our reps which I love to do.  It gets me out of this miserable office (I hate being tied to a desk!) and I love to meet new people and help the reps with prospecting and developing new business within existing accounts. Remember, work smarter not harder and utilize the tools available to help you get new business and remain at the top!

The last word: “You are the only person on earth who can use your ability.” –Zig Ziglar

Some reps have said I’m a demanding manager.  Not a tyrant by any means, nothing of the sort.  I simply have high expectations.  I have high expectations of myself so it stands to reason that I have high expectations of others.  I’ve learned over the years that if you expect the best from yourself and from others, people will typically make the extra effort to be successful and do a good job.  No matter what the job is.  I discovered that owning a small business was very demanding and it was challenging meeting my personal expectations.  Those days have gone and now I’m on the other end of the ‘food chain’ again.

A manufacturers rep told me one day that I was a demanding customer.  I asked him why.  Because he (the mfrs rep) failed to follow-up with a request I had made not once, but on three separate occasions in an effort to get some information to help one of my staff help with a customer sale.  That makes me a ‘demanding’ person?  I simply smiled and told him that if I was as tough a customer/manager as he implied then I would have called his superior after the second request was ignored.  If this makes me a demanding person, then I’m proud of it.  If you are like me then you can relate to how much emphasis I/you place on giving outstanding customer care/service.  You can’t build long-term personal relationships on crappy customer service.  You don’t build loyalty with crappy customer service.  Instead you bust your behind doing what other people fail, or refuse, to do to give your clients the service they deserve.  Don’t you think YOU deserve that same level of service from others?  How about from the company you work for?

How does this relate to the topic of this post?  Oftentimes when I talk to other sales people I like to ask a tough question. 

Here it is: Would you buy product from your own company?

Many, many times the answer is “no”.  The reason is not usually because of a defective or faulty product.  It usually stems from poor service from other areas in the business out of their control or influence.  Their internal customer service fails in some way, or sometimes their accounting personnel has poor people skills or worse yet, unprofessional collection procedures.  Sometimes it is the delivery or warehouse staff or some other distribution issue directly attributed to their company.  While a one-on-one with the reps manager may bring attention to the issues, most often the problems are never corrected.  If you have, or currently experience these kinds of problems then I’m preaching to the choir so to speak.

So I ask you again, “Would you buy products from your own company” and still feel confident that you will have a great buyers experience?  Think about it.

The last word: “Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.”-Zig Ziglar

I suppose you are familiar with price creep.  This is when a retailer takes a product and places it on sale and when it comes off sale the price has ‘creeped’ up higher than the original selling price.  For example if the product originally sold for $14.99 and the sale price was $10.99, when the item comes off sale the new selling price is now $15.49.  This is the most subtle way stores increase selling prices to an unwary buyer.  This type of price increase is especially popular in grocery stores.  So price creep is when the price gradually ‘creeps’ up at a rate nearly undetectable.

Margin Creep is similar.  For my definition: Margin Creep is a gradual downward trend in profit margins due to several causes.  Margins are gradually creeping downward as reps try to be more competitive and gain new business, or the marketplace has become much more competitive and margins have creeped down as a dealer attempts to hold selling prices while his costs (direct or indirect) are rising.  The danger in this is obvious in most ways but what I’m beginning to see is reps are selling products at lower margins for no justifiable reason.  I discovered a rep actually lower an already quoted price that had been accepted by the buyer simply because they discovered that the manufacturer had a ‘special’ deal on that item for the period.  What could have resulted in a 40%GPM unfortunately wound up with a 21%GPM.  I don’t know about you but when I was a commissioned rep I would much rather have commission on a 40 margin than I would a 21 margin!  When I asked  “Why?” there wasn’t a valid reason but it was too late to back out because the customer had already been informed of the price change.

In this case special pricing from manufacturers are designed to help gain new business, introduce new products and obviously support and drive up new sales.  So as managers and owners, how are we supposed to deal with these kinds of issues?  Do we not inform the reps until after the billing is done and then show them the extra dollars they made or do we take advantage of how special pricing deals are designed to work?  I did a little experiment, I let a rep quote and win a furniture job that had an extra margin discount from the manufacturer and I intentionally did not tell the rep of this extra margin that was available.  The rep did a good job selling the customer and won the business.  The job was quoted at an 18%GPM.  The customer was satisfied with the quote and the work after the install was completed.  When the billing was generated the result was a 35%GPM.  More money for the rep and for the dealer.  So, what does the future decide?  You make the call.

The last word: “Don’t lower our expectations to meet your performance. Raise your level of performance to meet your expectations. Expect the best of yourself, and then do what is necessary to make it a reality.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson