David Rascoe, president of Thermal Industries Inc., a manufacturer of windows and doors that employs more than 400 people, has come face to face with several critical business challenges. The company has experienced a drop in sales, a lack of consumer financing and, most importantly, a lack in consumer confidence.
“To overcome these challenges, it’s been kind of an all-hands-on-deck approach,” Rascoe says. “When it comes to getting in front of the customers, all of our key managers and executives get in front of customers to understand better how we can add value to the business and find better solutions to meet their needs.”
The company continues to work aggressively with its customers to step up in its struggling areas.
Smart Business spoke to Rascoe about how he meets customers’ needs through adding value.
Meet customer needs. You’ve got to be personally committed to being in front of your customers and having a constant direct communication with your sales and marketing teams to have a grasp on the current environment. The organization needs to be flatter in these times to improve the flow and speed of communication. You’ve got to be actively engaged and driving, in our case as a manufacturer, the product-development process.
It’s a time commitment to personally being out with your rank and file in the field, talking to your large customers and, most importantly, talking to prospects as well to understand better what your organization has to do to compete more effectively, whether it is on the sales training side, the marketing development side, or product development and support.
The focus has to be on how you add value to your customers versus just selling a product. You have to find a unique solution to their business problems and have a commitment to being in the field with your sales team to best understand the challenges and, more importantly, the opportunities where many may only see problems. That fuels the engine and fuels the growth.
Add value. It’s like how real estate is location, location, location. When you’re trying to find the value-adds and be innovative, it’s people, people and people. You’ve got to have the flow of ideas and communication within your organization, and you’ve got to have the recognition to those who generate ideas. Not necessarily financial, but recognition that they get for making the kind of contributions through various methods.
We look to bring a lot of our contract customers in to our factory to do tours, and it’s less to learn about the product and, more importantly, to meet the people. Through the exchange of dialogue and communication, you gain ideas both on existing products that you have and product opportunities that they see out of their markets. Some of these things happen through discussion on the shop floors and some of them happen in the engineering area where you’re showing them how you do testing and some of them happen in your showroom where you’re walking through your product with your marketing and sales folks. When your customers truly believe you care, this breeds this kind of communication.
Communicate to find answers. Our innovation is very much a product of a 360-degree feedback loop where we have service technicians who are in consumers’ homes and are continuously getting feedback about products, and we continually mine that data. You’ve got to be talking to customers and trying to understand the pain they’re experiencing and looking for the unique solutions that can add value for them and their process. This isn’t necessarily led by executive management. It’s led by these teams at the field level. They’re the ones on the street that see these things, and they’re constantly engaged in discussing what these opportunities are. We may not all agree that these are good opportunities for the company, but they can all be opportunities.
Through this process, your people have to get very good at the art of probing and asking solid and investigative questions to gain insight to problems that your customers don’t yet recognize as their problem and provide a solution. A lot of times, people are talking about one thing that’s their problem, but it really is a symptom of another problem. So it’s going through that investigative questioning process to help determine what might be a unique solution that we can provide. That sometimes can be through something different in our manufacturing, something different in our product development or something different in a basic service we provide. It could be just for that customer or it could be for all of our customers.
You never want to stop learning from others, so it’s a great thing to keep reading and keep engaged not only within the industry but outside the industry. I get some of my best ideas and impetus to do things from reading outside of our industry and applying those ideas and strategies within the scope of our business.
HOW TO REACH: Thermal Industries Inc., (800) 245-1540 or www.thermalindustries.com
