Finding The Right Ear

“This account is in the bag,” you say to yourself as you walk back to the car after a customer meeting. “I had that buyer hanging on every word of my sales pitch. She was receptive, listened intently, and said the chances of doing business were better than good. I’m in!”

Once you’re done patting yourself on the back for a “dog-and-pony show” well done, ponder this: Maybe you weren’t talking to the right person.

Today, it’s a pervasive industry problem — salespeople wasting their time talking to people who, ultimately, don’t have the final say regarding which products and equipment make it into the hands of their housekeeping crews.

Odds are, more than one person in an organization influences each purchasing decision. And the criteria that drive those various decision makers to select certain products and equipment varies widely.

The Decision-Making Machine
This subject was a hot topic at a series of ISSA-sponsored “Show and Sell” seminars conducted by John Walker earlier this year. Walker, president of Managemen Inc., Salt Lake City, noted that a significant number of distributors stopped by after the program who were clearly concerned that they or their salespeople might not be talking to the right people.

There are two main reasons distributor salespeople fail to reach decision makers, Walker says. One is call reluctance — the salesperson doesn’t want to be rejected, so he or she avoids situations where rejection is a possibility.

The second reason is that the salespeople don’t understand the way organizations buy. “This is particularly a problem in business-to-business buying,” he says.

The buying process can be complex. More facility decision makers influence product decisions than ever before: purchasing managers, human resources professionals, safety directors and resident environment experts are just a few of the players that may weigh in on the procurement of cleaning products. Each player has his or her own unique perspective regarding how a distributor’s products or systems should or could affect their respective missions.

Today’s distributor salesperson must have a sense — going into a call — of the possible implications of his or her sales pitch. Is what you are proposing a fairly uncomplicated decision, perhaps about products the customer already knows and uses? Or is it something that could affect a facility profoundly, either because of its cost or effect on operations?

Who Says?
Don’t make any assumptions about who might be making the buying decisions within an organization, says Dave Donnelly, sanitary supplies division manager for Perkins Co., Inc., Taunton, Mass. Instead, ask a series of pointed questions to get past “gatekeepers” and get to the person — or people — who can really make things happen.

“We train people not to assume that the owner, manager or director of maintenance or housekeeping is necessarily making the buying decisions,” Donnelly explains.

There are ways to get to right person. Sometimes, there will be roadblocks. Other times, it’s easier. When a salesperson visits a potential new account, for example, sometimes the best method is to ask, straight out, who the decision maker is.

An initial sales call becomes a fact-finding mission.

“The first thing to do is probing and questioning and this is where you’d use closed-in probes — with yes and no answers — until you get to somebody who you’re pretty sure is a buyer. Most of your selling activities should be probing,” Walker suggests.

Luckily, many facility employees will direct you along the right path — if you ask the right questions.

“Two great questions to ask anyone you talk to: ‘Do you buy the cleaning materials for this organization?’ And if they say “yes,” do a follow-up like ‘How much are you allowed to buy at a time, or in a year?’” Walker suggests. How much they buy is as important as if they’re authorized to buy — salespeople must be careful how much time they spend with someone whose budget is only $100 per month.

“We generally try to qualify that person up front, just by asking questions when we first go in and speak to a prospective customer,” says David Spencer, president, Atlantic Paper and Twine Co., Pawtucket, R.I. “We’re on in information-gathering mission, finding out what the needs are and who makes the decisions that affect the [final] decision.”

Walker points to one rule of thumb on determining whether you’re talking to the decision maker: if you haven’t passed through two gatekeepers to get there, you may be talking to the wrong person.

“If you make an appointment with the first person who wants to talk to you, they’re probably not the buyer — even if their title is buyer,” says Walker. “If you’re conducting a call where you’re just visiting, and they’re showing casual interest in everything, that’s a red flag.”

Ties That Bind
While every salesperson’s goal should be to find the person able to make a decision based on what he is selling, every other decision-making rung on the ladder is important, too.

Relationships are the foundation that allows distributors to build business with a customer, whether they’re with the maintenance people, or with those who lead an organization, says Jonathan Cohen, vice president, I. Janvey & Sons, Hempstead, N.Y. By having relationships with maintenance personnel — providing them training and value-added services — they will help sell your company to their superiors.

“You have to climb the ladder — you really do,” says Cohen. “Top-down and bottom-up sell. You have to talk to the people in a building and you have to build relationships with the maintenance person, the security guard, the gatekeepers. Write their names down, know what their kids are doing, bring coffee or donuts — pay a little attention and take some notes.”

Cohen is a firm believer that each individual in an organization has some power over whether a decision gets made in a seller’s favor. “The more people that know our faces, the more success we’ll have,” Cohen adds.

“Most of the time, there’s not one key decision maker,” says Spencer. “Part of it is our varied product lines, but the other part of it is our sales approach, the goal of which is to develop a system sell.

“In many of our accounts, we run vendor-managed inventory (VMI) programs, and once we become a vendor that’s doing a VMI program, we meet everyone,” he continues. “We tend to meet the users of the products, the people on the line, then have one point of contact, depending on the company — usually purchasing or financial — but then we get the attention of management, too, because when we’re doing VMI Sytems that involve all these products, the dollar amount is high,” Spencer explains.

This approach is geared toward a higher-level sell, he says. We’re promoting and selling value-added services and showing them how much money we’re going to save them through reduced product cost, he explains.

There are decision makers, then there are “influencers” — those whose input affects the final outcome. Every relationship makes a difference, according to distributors.

“You have to be sensitive that you’re talking to someone that can influence the buyer. You’ve got to be sensitive to the fact they may be included in the buying decision, but don’t make the ultimate decision,” says Donnelly.

Walker illustrates this point: a distributor is selling to a building service contractor and has been trying for some time to get the customer to buy a line of environmentally preferable toweling. They seem interested, but they never place any orders. Finally, the sales rep asks why they haven’t made a purchase. Their answer? We buy what our customers ask for, and they haven’t asked for this.

The point: instead of spending hours talking to the contractor’s employees, the seller should have been in front of the contractor’s customers, talking to safety officers, medical directors or human resource people within the organizations.

“If you’re calling on people who aren’t empowered to make a decision, you’re just wasting your time,” Walker says.

Getting Past Purchasing
As challenging as sorting through the array of potential decision makers is the prospect of dealing with a purchasing department bureaucracy. While some distributors have found their relationships with purchasing departments productive, others find dealing with these “lowest-price oriented” professionals frustrating.

“It can be difficult when they don’t know how a certain product is being used or how much better or easier one product might be over another if they’re looking at case price or a box price,” Spencer says.

“In that case, we might ask if [purchasing has] a problem if we brought this to the shipping department and showed them, or the maintenance people and explained it to them. And if the person takes their job seriously and is acting as a professional, they’ll want the best things for the company, whether it’s lower price or savings through process improvement. Most people are open to that idea as long as there’s communication that keeps them involved,” Spencer adds.

Walker says even if orders are placed in purchasing, that department is not who distributors should be targeting.

“All across the country, [distributors] think purchasing people are making buying decisions, and they spend a lot of time calling on purchasing agents, but they’re not the buyer,” Walker says. “They issue the order and put the bid out. You need to find out who’s placing those requests, and what they know about writing a spec. The purchasing guy doesn’t make decisions about what people are going to clean with.”

Big decisions are made higher up, says John Monoky, a wholesale distribution expert and professor of marketing at the University of Michigan.

“I don’t think most [distributor salespeople] get past the purchasing people or the maintenance people,” says Monoky. “One of the other problems I find is it’s always a price buy based on the people they talk to.”

Monoky says the way salespeople are trained and paid contributes to their inability to get past the purchasing department. He says the majority of salespeople are trained on product — not on pinpointing their customers’ organizational needs. Therefore, salespeople have a difficult time seeing past product pitches to promote and pinpoint significant organizational issues that would get the ear of high-level decision makers.

“They have to get a different kind of seller,” says Monoky. They have to “specialize” salespeople by customer type. “The geographic salesperson is not necessarily going to have the skill set to do that with the customer.”

This type of selling might require significant retooling of a distributors’ sales force. “You almost need to have a specialized sales force targeting a certain type of customer. The basic questions are: How do you assign salespeople to certain accounts and how do you train them to sell effectively?

Monoky says some pre-call research can put salespeople on the right track. For example, if the company is publicly traded, more information might be available. Similarly, a distributor might want to put his or her head together with other suppliers who sell the prospect complementary products.

“I don’t think it’s a matter of comfort level, it’s a matter of education,” Donnelly says. “Not only to teach them to get to the buyer, but teach them how to identify a piece of business worth calling on. All you have as a salesperson is time, so you better make the most of your time.”

Who’s Working For You?
Cohen, who contends that maintenance departments make 70 to 80 percent of buying decisions regarding his products, says he often trusts those departments to pass his message along to their superiors. However, there are times when he’s been asked — or has requested — to be included in meetings between maintenance and upper management, giving him a chance to make sure his pitch gets made to all relevant parties.

This is especially important when a decision will change the way a department operates or if it means investing more money in a product, Cohen says.

He points to microfiber as one example of a decision that usually must originate at the top. Switching from string mops to flat mops comes at a hefty cost, with accompanying process changes.

Donnelly says there have been times when he’s had to bypass housekeeping decision makers and go to administrators or infectious-control departments in hospitals to find the audience best suited to his pitch. Customers can be protective of their organizational authority and can make it difficult for salespeople to interface with other decision makers. It’s a delicate process, but there are ways to do it without tarnishing an important relationship with any one decision maker.

Spencer says he’ll consider going over a contact’s head if there’s tremendous cost savings to be had and his contact is not responsive. It’s also an option if the contact doesn’t fully understand how the solution will benefit the operation or is not authorized to do anything about it.

“It’s a tricky area for sure. We’ll try to … tactfully go around that contact person. I find it’s always best to be up front with the person,” Spencer says.

Cohen agrees it can be touchy.

“That’s always a fine line because you have to walk that balance beam of going over someone’s head and insulting them, and the [rationale] that you’ve tried umpteen times to get to his boss,” Cohen says. “That’s a decision you have to make.”

Sometimes Cohen says he’ll step in and take the heat for a salesperson, doing his best not to step on any toes.

“I try never to jeopardize or sabotage the good quality relationships the sales force has built,” he says.

Donnelly is careful to protect relationships as well. “If I go to ‘infectious control’ and they go to an administrator who goes to the executive housekeeper, he could sabotage [the sale].

“At some point I may call the executive housekeeper and say ‘I brought this idea to infectious control, and you didn’t think it would be a good fit, but what I don’t want to do is continue on this path without including you,’” Donnelly adds. “Make them part of the decision. You need them to know that sometimes you’ve got to do these things, but then you have to go back and try to include them.”

When you’re pitching your ideas at the housekeeping level, you have to consider whether housekeeping will be able to translate your message to their superiors, even if the former is entirely sold on the idea. For instance, you’ve pitched housekeepers flat mops for the facility, but the purchase requires a large capital expenditure. Housekeeping needs to sell it to the administration in spite of the fact that it exceeds their budget.

The salesperson might suggest that he or she attend that type of meeting, Donnelly says. You don’t want the housekeeping department spokesperson to not communicate critical buying points to the point where other decision makers miss the reasons the system will benefit the organization in the long run.

If you do land a meeting with a top-level facility executive, be sure to keep your message short and sweet. Donnelly contends that the gist of your message should come in the first two minutes of a conversation.

“If you lose them in the first minute or two, you’re not going to get them,” says Donnelly. “This goes for everyone.”