3/29/2007
Reframing the Issue–A Sales Success Story
In Tuesday’s post, I talked about how The UPS Store turned convention upside-down, literally.
It got me thinking how, in sales, it’s so easy to get locked into a pattern of thinking and a pattern of conversation. Usually, we go through the motions without even being aware of it. Once in awhile, however, we’re jolted awake when an issue is completely reshaped.
A few years back, when I was in packaging, another sales rep and I were at a large distribution facility trying to sell brown paper to replace their Styrofoam “peanuts”.
Our preparation was excellent. We had all the right samples. We were meeting with top level decision-makers–the plant manager, the QC manager, and the purchasing director. We had plenty of statistics in our briefcases that revealed a rather fetching ROI. And we weren’t just talking–we were out there on the line, making a demonstration.
Although we were doing everything right, everything was going wrong. In fact, it was one of the worst sales calls I ever made. The plant manager insisted our product would slow down production. The QC manager was in the middle of some crisis and kept getting interrupted by assistants. The purchasing director just kept chanting, “Peanuts are cheaper. Peanuts are cheaper.” In the background, the line workers we were interrupting were snickering at us.
On top of that, it was the dog days of summer and the plant had to be 100 degrees. My colleague and I were stuffing box after box with paper as fast as we could to prove we could match their current throughput. You can bet that our sweat-soaked shirts did not make our pitch any more seductive or convincing. I wanted to go home.
In the midst of all this, who walks by but the owner of the company. He studies the situation carefully.
“What’s going on?” he asks.
“We’re looking at paper to replace the peanuts. Won’t work though,” replies the plant manager.
Then the owner says, “We’ve been getting lots of complaints from customers about those [expletive] peanuts. Switch.”
And that was that–sale closed.
My partner and I did everything right on this call except identify the correct need and the right contact. If the owner hadn’t happened to walk by and buy, we would have remained clueless. We’d have walked away without an order, grumbling about how shortsighted the customer was.
In chess, they teach you to study every move and capture before making a decision. Same thing in sales. Study every benefit and buying influence before committing to a plan!
