Most of the best sales ideas don’t occur at work. They might pop into your head on the drive into work, but rarely, say jan/san distributors, do those Eureka! moments materialize once you’ve entered the routine environment of daily operations. They come up at the dinner table. They unexpectedly appear out of the mist of your morning shower. Of course, good sales ideas can come out of formal sales meetings as well, but however those flashes of inspiration come, distributors have to be ready for them. Fresh sales ideas can even show up when you’re miles away from work — on vacation. That’s what happened to Rick Faber, general manager for AmSan Nogg Chemical, a distributor in Omaha, Neb. He had one of his most innovative and successful ideas when he was supposed to be “getting away” from the pressure of overseeing the company’s sales mission.

“I went to Kansas City on vacation, and the theme song from the movie Top Gun came on the radio,” he says. “When I heard that song, I pictured mechanics and workers using teamwork to help the pilot get off the ground — just like in the movie.”

Faber saw a way to use the blockbuster soundtrack to boost the morale of his sales team.
“Sales had been a little sluggish, so I decided to play the theme song at our next sales meeting. Not only that, I had the president of the company walk in wearing an authentic flight suit. It gave everyone a picture about working together for a common cause. We even built our entire sales compensation around the theme: For every sales benchmark, salespeople would earn ‘military’ stripes and gold stars. That was one of the top years we’ve had in terms of sales performance.”

Great sales and marketing ideas can spring from the unlikeliest places — any time of the day — and a distributor salesperson needs to keep his or her antenna up for unexpected inspiration. “It’s not that I never stop thinking about work,” says Faber. “I’ve just trained myself to look for broad sales ideas in everyday life,” he says. “The problem for so many sales managers is that they’re so busy, they can’t pull themselves out of the loop of those daily activities.”

Business research has shown that the fast pace of a workplace setting is usually not conducive to getting a fresh perspective on improving operations. “A lot of business leaders find that their most ingenious sales ideas — or any ideas for that matter — happen when they’re away from work,” says Charles West, program director for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s executive education courses. “If salespeople can just find the time to occasionally step back — whether it’s at a formal sales workshop or just taking time to recharge — they’re usually less frustrated in developing sales strategies.”

Setting aside time specifically for brainstorming can be a troublesome task for salespeople. “If this were a utopian society, having a set time to brainstorm for fresh, new ideas would be ideal,” says Joel Dreifus, president of Laymen Global, a jan/san distributor in Rahway, N.J.

“Salespeople tend to be free spirits, who regard scheduled or unfocused brainstorming sessions as impediments to what they consider to be more important, which is pounding the pavement and spending time with their clients,” he says. “We try to keep restrictive time to a minimum. The sales staff and support staff is encouraged to collect their thoughts and bring them to the weekly sales meetings where we bounce ideas and our past week’s experiences off each other.”

Look Around
If those weekly sales meetings are helping to generate new ideas for sales and new accounts, then they’re worth the time. However, great sales ideas don’t have to come out of a sales meeting.

“It’s true, there are a lot of great ideas for distributor sales,” says Lanny Schuster, president and owner of United Sanitary Supply, Baltimore. “Just pulling into a gas station, I might notice how the building has combined a Dunkin’ Donuts with a Subway restaurant, and it might give me an idea for bundling our jan/san products with similar products from another industry — foodservice or safety supplies, for example.” Taking a hint from the local gas station, Schuster’s company has had favorable results bundling and cross-marketing product lines for a variety of customers.

The jan/san executive has an advantage for generating sales ideas, says Caldwell Smith, president and owner of Mid-American Chemical Supply, Nicholasville, Ky. “If you think about it, many of us are in public buildings all the time,” he says. “I usually just take a minute to walk around a building, regardless of what I’m there for, and I check out the restrooms and get ideas for how they operate that particular facility. That’s a simple, but effective, way to find new angles for your accounts.”

Jack Welch, the legendary president of General Electric, always contended that he’d much rather have one executive strike out trying to hit a home run with a new idea than 100 executives who never get the bat off their shoulder. A large part of facilitating great distributor sales ideas is cultivating a corporate atmosphere that nurtures brainstorming and taking chances, says Schuster.

“Our motto is: learn and earn,” he says. “If salespeople keep their eyes open and keep growing as professionals, then the accounts will come. As a company owner, you can do a lot to encourage an attitude of learning by your sales staff. One example — one thing we do — is to simply hold regular brainstorming sessions for our salespeople.”

Bogged Down and Dutiful
Ironically, sluggish economic cycles inhibit fresh thinking just when it’s most important. Take the current recession: many jan/san distributors are so overwhelmed with business challenges wrought by slow-moving inventory, they don’t take the time to think outside the box when it comes to sales and sales management, says Shelly Riha, president of Nogg Chemical. “It’s really easy for distributors to just sell the same programs as the year before,” she says. “If you’re at your desk, it usually doesn’t work — at least, in my experience — to try to think about new sales ideas for an hour. You really have to have talented people who can give time and energy to giving that direction to your sales staff.”

Sales managers aren’t the only ones who get in an idea rut. When business is down, it’s a natural sales inclination to bemoan the sales climate, rather than be innovative, says Schuster. “It happens all the time,” he says. “Salesperson A will tell me that salesperson B has all the good accounts, and salesperson B says that salesperson C has all the good accounts. They feel like they’ve contacted everyone in their territory and that every opportunity has been exhausted.”

Employees working to squeeze every last drop of business out of their current accounts may be wasting valuable time. It’s paramount, say the experts, that they take time to pursue new business as well. “What I hear a lot from my salespeople is that they are just too busy with their existing customers to spend time prospecting for new business,” Riha says. “So, in that case, we sit down with them and have what I call a stratification session. We help them identify customers that they need to keep up with, and others that are not worth spending a lot of time on. That usually starts to free them up for generating new leads and new ideas about achieving sales.”

As companies do all they can to leverage business opportunities, sales organizations are rethinking — and revamping — traditional sales roles, says West. “We’re seeing a huge paradigm shift in the way selling is done,” he says. “The old school way of selling is to get out a map and give each salesperson a territory. What we’re seeing now is more and more sales staffs that are designating one group of salespeople for existing customers and another group whose sole job is to prospect for new business.”

An Innovative Enrivonment
Often, the benefits of pursuing a new sales strategy aren’t evident until sales staffs break away from the traditional way of managing their accounts. “Helping your salespeople find where new business is coming from is really important,” explains Schuster. “For example, at a recent sales meeting, I had everyone identify customers we lost and why. We also examined new accounts and why we were able to get business with them. What we saw was pretty surprising.”

The sales staff at United Sanitary Supply learned that increasing numbers of blue-collar manufacturing buildings were going out of state (or even out of the country), while an emerging customer base comprised of community-service facilities — such as youth centers and assisted-living organizations — was on the rise. This insight caused Schuster’s sales team to target more community-service customers and fewer manufacturing facilities. The number of new accounts the company has acquired has skyrocketed since the strategic shift.

United Sanitary’s sales strategy meeting could be categorized as formal sales training. Other formal sales opportunies — from vendor seminars to association classes — continue to be valuable sales resources for savvy distributors as well.

“International Sanitary Supply Association (ISSA) trade shows and training classes are a great way to find gems or sales formulas that we can bring back to our sales force,” says Riha. “The trade show is [usually] in October, and we use a lot of those ideas to get our programs in place for the next year. By December, we have targets and sales programs ready to go.”

“We attend a lot of seminars that are outside our industry,” adds Faber. “One time I went to a training seminar that was just about general multi-tasking for business, but I saw a lot of things in it that would help our sales team.”

Universities and colleges — like the University of Wisconsin-Madison — are getting in on the sales-education act, too. Business schools are investing thousands of dollars in attracting corporate salespeople to their top-tier sales training seminars. Some, like the University of Texas A&M’s Read Center of Distribution, have been around for years, while others, like Penn State University, recently started executive sales education programs that target distributors.

In addition to association and university curricula, many manufacturers offer sales programs that help distributor salespeople get an edge on the competition in coming up with untried angles for sales and marketing.

“A vendor sponsored a fantastic sales seminar for our company that helped us identify how many average product lines we usually sell per order,” says Schuster. “We found that the number was 3.25, so whenever our salespeople were filling out orders, it was usually for about three products. Well, I’ve been able to show the salespeople that if they increase the average order by just one line item, they will increase their annual income by 10 percent.”

For example, if a customer buys five cases of paper towel, a six-gallon container of floor chemical, a carpet chemical and then the salesperson adds just one item — an order of mops, maybe — the salesperson will increase his or her annual commission. “So far it’s worked great, and we’re seeing that a lot of new business can come from existing customers.”

Whether they’re found empirically through sales data or listening to the radio, the greatest sales ideas won’t hold much water unless a sales staff is willing to see them through, says Riha. “At the end of the day, the punch line is that no matter how great a sales presentation or program is, it won’t work unless you do,” she says. “The idea can be the start of a great sale, but salespeople still need to deliver and go to work on it.”




POSTED ON: 4/1/2004