Staying Alive

The struggles of a business trying to survive.

Editor’s note: Paul Downs is writing this week about his decision to hire a sales consultant. The series started with this post.

Sam Saxton had hired a consultant to help him revamp his sales operation shortly after acquiring his company. Unlike me, Mr. Saxton had not spent years selling a product that he had designed himself. He did no sales at all, and he had never been directly involved with selling. And the sales staff that he inherited when he bought his company was not performing well. So he brought in a consultant, Bob Waks, to give them a tune-up.

Mr. Saxton is a courageous guy. When he needed sales help, he just searched online for  “sales consultant” and called a couple of the companies that came up in the results. After interviewing a number of candidates, he chose Mr. Waks. By the time my problem came around, Mr. Saxton had been working with Mr. Waks for more than a year and had experienced a striking increase in sales volume. He told me that I should get some help with selling and that Mr. Waks was the guy to call.

Being told that my selling methods needed improvement was a blow to my pride. I had been closing deals for 24 years, and I thought I had a pretty good handle on how it should be done. I also thought I had the right attitude about my sales efforts: passion for my people and our work and pride in our beautiful proposals. Asking for outside help was an admission that maybe I wasn’t as good a salesman as I had thought and that maybe our process wasn’t so great either. But by the end of May 2012, with our sales lagging far behind target and our backlog disappearing, I called Mr. Waks.

Our first meeting was a little disconcerting. Mr. Waks came over to my shop and, like all visitors, he was given the tour: busy workshop, cool machines, highest quality woodwork being produced. My usual guest is a potential buyer, and a little walkabout puts them in the mood to place an order. But Mr. Waks was giving out a different vibe.

He wasn’t blown away by what he had seen, because that wasn’t what he had come to see. He was intent on signing me up. We ended up chatting in my office, and, to be frank, he came on a little strong. There was just the slightest whiff of snake oil in the room. I wasn’t prepared for a sales professional unleashing his whole skill set on me. Through all of the years I had been selling, my main method had been to let my product speak for itself. My approach was to tell the story of how we designed and built work. A certain type of buyer wants what we make, and that’s whom we try to sell to.

Mr. Waks had a different approach. He had a strong idea of what was common to every sale, in every business: the relationship between buyer and seller. He had a very distinct point of view as to what happens between the two. His pitch was that we needed to understand selling, pure selling, first. When we had received that training, then we could adapt those ideas to our particular product and sales methods.

I had never thought about selling that way. Frankly, I had never felt that I needed to think about the pure art of selling, separate from our product. The method I had developed, using our design and engineering skills to make a beautiful proposal, was a direct extension of the way we make furniture. The proposals were a little bit of craftsmanship that we gave away for free. Usually it worked, but my recent failures were fresh in my mind. In those cases something more had been required. Mr. Waks was promising to teach us a strategy that would help us understand what we needed to do beyond just writing good proposals.

His pitch was convincing, and his ideas made a lot of sense. But there is always something a little suspect about a pure sales animal. I wanted to believe in what I had heard, but on the other hand I was aware that I was getting the full treatment from an ice-to-eskimos kind of guy. And his services weren’t going to be cheap. He recommended a three-part contract: first, evaluation of myself and my sales staff and our methods. Then a 10-week training course in the Sandler Method of selling for myself and my staff. And throughout that, and continuing for a year, monthly consults. One meeting would be one-one-one with me, and the other with me and my three salespeople. All of that would cost me $37,000. It would be $8,000 to start, the rest spread out in 12 payments.

Mr. Saxton’s experience with Mr. Waks had been positive, so I pulled the trigger. I wanted some outside help. I have benefited greatly from getting some coaching on being a leader, courtesy of my Vistage group, and I also felt that I had little to lose. Our sales volume was dropping fast. I needed a fresh approach.

Thursday: The Brutal Truth: How I Scored as a Sales Manager.

Paul Downs founded Paul Downs Cabinetmakers in 1986. It is based outside Philadelphia.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/meet-the-sales-consultant/?partner=rss&emc=rss