A year ago, Dolf Kahle, CEO of Twinsburg’s Visual Marking Systems, had a problem. The manufacturer of product identification for industrial companies — “decals, labels, nameplates,” he says — had noticed that his company wasn’t growing as quickly as it had earlier in the decade.
“I had five sales people working in five territories, and they were expected to go into that territory and handle the existing clientele, grow the existing clientele and find us new business,” he says. The problem? “They were spending a lot of time calling on little accounts, and those little accounts were taking up way too much time.”
Looking for a solution, Kahle called Marc Miller, president of ChangeMaster Corp., a 12-year-old Twinsburg company that helps companies better utilize their sales force to make their companies grow.
“We try to understand what’s holding them back from doing better,” Miller says. “And that can be a lot of different things.”
When Miller and Kahle met, Kahle remembers, “He started to go through his discovery process to find out who I was and what I was looking for.” Afterward, Miller suggested he put Kahle’s sales team through the same drill to see what their strengths were and how they could best contribute to the company.
“One night I had a sales training session where we were role playing and doing telephone work,” Kahle remembers. “He sat in and listened and said, ‘You have some serious problems separating the service people from the sales people.’”
At that, Kahle and Miller committed the next 12 months to rehauling the department, and Kahle’s business hasn’t been the same since.
Miller took VMS’ five sales territories and turned them into three. He assigned two sales reps to each territory, one as a regional sales manager and one as a service representative.
“The head of that sales team finds new business. The other takes care of existing business — calling the accounts, taking care of the quotes, taking care of their questions, freeing up that aggressive, outgoing, find-the-new-business sales person’s time so that they’re doing nothing but that,” explains Kahle.
“That was the earth-shattering revelation,” he pauses. “I had been so successful for so many years, but all of a sudden it wasn’t working.”
The solution was simple, Miller says.
“We put them into teams, more according to who they were, their capabilities,” he says. But the sales people’s strategy needed work as well. “They were calling everybody who bought a label or a decal on this earth,” he says.
Kahle agrees: “What we were getting was the little guy who was saying, ‘I need five trucks done with decals,’” Kahle says. “We’d do their decals for them, but we weren’t going to see them again for another five years. It takes a sales person a lot of time to do those five trucks versus going to Telxon [Corp.] and getting all their business which comes in every day.”
When Miller made this discovery, he laid down the law.
“We said to them, ‘You can only call on $50,000-plus opportunities,” he says. “They were measuring activity, trying to get them to make 40 calls a day on the phone, which was a major mistake. We wanted them to be more strategic. To maybe make three calls a day, but [to] work on $50,000 opportunities.”
Miller helps companies come to these conclusions through a process that includes evaluating sales people with behavioral, personality, cognitive and aptitude tests.
“They use them before they make a hire,” he says, “so they don’t shoot themselves in the foot.”
He also evaluates how sales teams create and manage their leads and how they face their customers and their market.
“We test for competency by watching simulations and role plays,” he says. “The key is [for companies to] end up with a highly effective or skilled sales force.”
And what does Kahle think of his results?
“Instead of talking to one or two new large accounts a month, we’re now talking to a minimum of 12 a month,” he says. “That’s the minimum goal. And they’ve achieved that goal and more every month.”
That doesn’t surprise Miller. After all, he says, his mission is to do just that.
“Our training is very strategic,” he says. “It’s not about how to handle objections. It’s not about how to close. It’s not about how you make a presentation. It’s about how you add value [to the company].” How to reach: Visual Marking Systems: (330) 425-7100; ChangeMaster (330) 487-0300
Connie Swenson [email protected] is editor of SBN.
