Every distributor wants to sell high-volume floor care programs. Such accounts often have the potential to yield high revenue, as well as long-term partnerships with customers.

When a large facility — a sports stadium, for example — signs up for a year’s supply of floor chemicals, the distributor knows that account will keep generating business throughout the year. That’s quite an attractive prospect, especially in a stagnant economy.

But these accounts don’t come easy. Today’s jan/san distributors want to get the sale without doing any of the all-important prep work, says Don Wine, president and owner of Tucson-based Industrial Chemical of Arizona. “Just walking in on a customer and trying to get a sale is OK,” he says. “It’s good for your wallet in the short-term. But even if you make the sale, the important thing is learning how to make the program work for the customer, and that takes time.”

The danger in selling a one-time floor program is that the distributor might not provide adequate instruction, and the account will likely be lost within the first year, adds Wine.
“The University of Arizona has 500 custodians. The building managers don’t have time to retrain each custodian, so the distributor has to really make sure they get the right floor chemicals and give the university proper instruction on the best way to maintain their floors.”

Proper instruction requires asking the right questions of the customer. But, a distributor can’t just expect customers to volunteer specific details, says Karen Adams, president and owner of The Mop Bucket, a jan/san distributor in Kansas City, Mo. The burden of gathering the right information rests with the distributor. After all, it’s the distributor who is supposed to offer value through the partnership.

Get Specifics
“Every floor is different, regardless of what people might say,” says Adams. “You can’t just say ‘There’s vinyl tile, so I’ll use this chemical.’ Every floor environment is different, and every facility is different. In addition, you have to consider the environment that surrounds the facility. Are people entering the building from an asphalt parking lot? Is there good ventilation in the facility? Is dirt being tracked in? Those are the kinds of questions that impact your selection of floor chemicals.”

The internal environment of a facility is also important. For example, if a building doesn’t have access to hot water, then the floors will be significantly more difficult to strip. “We’ve sold to a few places that didn’t have access to hot water, and so we decided to sell them a cold-water stripper,” says Adams. “A lot of commercial buildings don’t have large hot water tanks, so the distributor has to keep that in mind.”

Even before talking with a purchasing agent, it’s a good idea for a distributor to get acquainted with the building. If the customer is a contractor, it’s still a good idea for the distributor to be familiar with the area the contractor is cleaning. Before Adams branched out into jan/san distribution, she was a contractor herself, and she claims that it wasn’t hard to separate the knowledgeable distributors from the naive.

“That was really the reason I started The Mop Bucket,” she says. “I was getting so frustrated with distributors who didn’t know the first thing about cleaning floors. There were a lot of people who were just selling products, but I wanted to be a distributor who could really empathize with the challenges cleaners face.”

When it comes to floor care, the most important role of the distributor is to make the customer’s job easier, says Wine. The distributor should think about how to save the customer money and time. In order to do those things in his own business, Wine follows three self-imposed requirements.

“The first thing, of course, is that you have to have a quality product that is specific to the building and the type of cleaning,” he says. “Next, you have to have good knowledge of floor care procedures and the best methods to employ. Lastly, you have to put in the time with the customer. That means building trust and gathering the right information about the facility and its needs.”

Now entering his thirty-sixth year as a distributor, Wine has seen many salespeople fall by the wayside because they ignored the last criterion. “A lot of people in sales today don’t want to take the time to make 20 or 30 phone calls, but that’s often what it takes to build up trust with the customer and make sure the floors are being done right.”

Keep Learning
But just because a distributor gives the proper advice and instruction — in tandem with the best product and methodology — that doesn’t mean his customers will be quick to listen, a lesson that Wine learned decades ago from a stubborn contractor.

“I had a fellow one time who was just starting out as a contract cleaner. He said he knew what he was doing, so I sold him what I considered our top two floor finishes,” he says. “He came back a few days later and said ‘This stuff is lousy!’ I told him that people all over town were using it and it worked great, but he said it wasn’t working one bit.”

After a lengthy discussion, Wine found out that the customer was pouring the floor finish into a mop bucket full of water and trying to use it as an industrial floor cleaner. After that, he gave the young contractor advice and he has been a faithful customer ever since. “We still talk about that incident today and we laugh,” says Wine.

Distributors and customers alike need to be learners as well as instructors when it comes to floor care. There are always new products being developed and new methods that might work better, so a salesperson should never be afraid to ask questions and grow in product knowledge, says Adams.

“I try to attend as many trade shows as I can, and I’m constantly evaluating new products,” she says. “The distributor needs to be well-informed because a lot of customers don’t have time to learn about what each product does. Most people don’t even read labels.”

At The Mop Bucket, Adams provides customers (and potential customers) with a slew of product literature, training seminars, instructional tapes and free demonstrations. She knows that any instruction she can provide will help her customers get the most out of their resources and keep them coming back in the future.

“I hear stories about people using cheap floor wax and even adding water to the wax so that it will last longer,” she says. “But your floor is not going to last if you use cheap products and cut corners. When I wax a floor, I roll up all the carpets and I wrap them in plastic. It takes longer, but the floor looks better. There’s nothing worse than waxing a floor and finding lots of little carpet hairs waxed into the floor.”

Pass on the Passion
Adams even takes off her shoes when she waxes a floor and walks around in her stocking feet. “I get a little messy, but the customers see me and they know that I really care about their floor, and the truth is that I do. I don’t want indentations in the floor from where I walked. I’ve had people say, ‘You know Karen, we will have to walk on this floor eventually.’”

Even if customers think that she’s a little obsessed with beautiful floors, they know that Adams is serious about their business. Jan/san distributors who are genuinely interested in helping their customers care for floors properly will naturally take time to invest their own energy and time in the final results.

“I learned to strip floors on my hands and knees with toothbrushes on the baseboards,” says Adams. “We don’t have to do that today because of the product advancements, but we should still want to put in the effort and make the floor really shine.”

And when floors continue to shine, customers will begin to pay attention, says Wine. “Knowing the customer and taking the time to ask the right questions will grow your business every time.”




POSTED ON: 8/1/2003