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Frequent Flier: A Cackling Toy Monkey in the Next Seat

August 5, 2013 by

I really do enjoy business travel. I work in the cleaning business for Zep Inc. as a marketing manager. I sometimes travel with sales representatives. Our sales reps are like consultants and can walk into a factory or hospital or really any place of business and they can tell management exactly what they need to do to disinfect. It always amazes me. Our business is all about relationships, so travel and those face-to-face meetings are just part of the job.

I’m one of those business travelers who will talk to anyone, but even my patience was tested on one flight by a grandmother and her over-caffeinated grandchild. Understand that I like children and grandmothers, but this little boy had a battery-powered monkey that made musical sounds and clapped its hands together. It sounds cute, but it wasn’t. This thing also had this crazy laugh, straight out of a horror movie like “Chucky.” I told the grandmother that the monkey would have to be switched off for takeoff. She said she didn’t know how. When a flight attendant came by to check on us, I was sure she’d turn off the monkey, but, of course, the thing went silent and I didn’t say anything.

While we were in flight, the monkey started to cackle again. I think it was controlled by a sensor. It was making the passengers who were seated near it really irritated. I was right next to it and I wanted to crawl out of the plane.

When the grandmother fell asleep I seized the moment and told the young man his monkey needed a nap and I took out the batteries. Mercifully, the young man accepted my explanation and he took a nap, too. The passengers around me were very grateful, but I swear that monkey was possessed since it stared at me the rest of the flight.

I’m not a nervous flier. I love watching aerobatics and always wondered what it would be like to be in one of those aircraft as they made those death-defying maneuvers. My wish came true on a flight to Chicago a few years ago.

We were supposed to be flying into Midway International and the pilot’s approach was long and slow. As we were coming in for the landing, not more than 1,000 feet off the ground, the pilot made a sharp turn to the right. The turn was so tight that he seemed to bank at a 90-degree angle. I had the window seat and was looking straight down at the ground. I could hear alarm bells going off in the cockpit. Just as I was convinced we were going to flip over on our back like a turtle, and any turtle can tell you that is not a good thing, the plane went into another 90-degree turn. But this time, it was to the left. I looked out the window again and I saw stars.

It seemed the pilot confused Chicago O’Hare with Chicago Midway and was landing at the wrong airport. At the last minute either he or the control tower realized the problem and he tried to correct his mistake. When we finally did land at Midway, the pilot bolted off the plane. I have never seen anyone move that fast. I haven’t flown on that particular airline since.

By Greg Hill, as told to Joan Raymond; E-mail: joan.raymond@nytimes.com.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/business/a-cackling-toy-monkey-in-the-next-seat.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss Blog: Why I Am Not Going to Renew the Sales Consultant

June 21, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Was the sales consultant worth the money to Paul Downs (above)?Laura Pedrick for The New York Times Was the sales consultant worth the money to Paul Downs (above)?

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.

A year has gone by, and I need to decide whether to renew my sales consultant’s contract. If I do, we will continue with two coaching sessions per month, one for me individually that will focus on my role as sales manager and the other a group meeting with my three sales representatives. Both sessions will be with the consultant, Bob Waks. For this, he wants $12,000. Is this a good value?

To answer that question, I need to first ask whether I got my money’s worth in the first year of consulting. I spent $37,000 for initial evaluations, a course in the Sandler Method, and ongoing evaluations. And after participating in all of that, I got the results I wanted. We have exceeded our sales target in every quarter since we started the training. In the first half of 2012, before training, we sold $865,274. In the second half of 2012, after starting the training, we sold $1,236,864. And this year, as of June 15, we had sold $1,218,414.

So for me, hiring a consultant worked. Here are some of the things that went right:

• I found my consultant by taking a recommendation from a colleague, Sam Saxton, who had had good results in a similar situation.

• The consultant had experience working with companies the size of mine, and he relies on referrals to keep busy. He had both the means and the motives to make our project a success.

• We had an easily identifiable problem, and the services we were offered were a good solution. All the way through, Mr. Waks explained exactly how he was going to address our issues, and it all made sense to me.

• We put a lot of effort into implementing the training we received. Everyone in my company knew from the beginning that we were in trouble, and I made it clear that this was going to be the solution and that I was behind the effort 100 percent. At the beginning, this took some faith in Mr. Waks’s skills, but the recommendations I had received were enough to build my own confidence. I put considerable effort into building up the information systems that would support our new sales method, both by writing new code in our database and by building spreadsheets (in Google Docs) that gave us a much more detailed look at incoming call patterns. These have been invaluable in identifying what type of client is calling us and in helping us identify those customers most likely to buy.

• We received ongoing evaluation and training. Our monthly meetings, over the course of a year, were critically important. They allowed us to get feedback as we adapted the broad ideas of the Sandler Method to our own world. Mr. Waks helped us figure out exactly how we should respond to particular situations. And the one-on-one sessions that I had with him were useful as well. He provided good advice as I puzzled through the implementation of the new system.

The best result for me, other than hitting our numbers, was to free up a lot of my time by allowing me to ease out of the sales role. Selling was my primary job for many, many years, and it took up most of the hours of my day. I now have more confidence that my sales people can hit their quotas, and I no longer feel the need to jump into the thick of things to save us. This has allowed me to spend more time analyzing the whole business, and it let me put into place a large number of improvements in communications and operations. It even gave me the opportunity to go back out on the shop floor and build some furniture for the first time since 1992. (I’ll be writing more about that.)

So will I renew the consultant’s contract? My decision is to hold off for now. Our steady stream of new orders has revealed some weaknesses in our production capacity, and I’d prefer to spend my cash addressing those issues. Also, I want to see if we can take what we have learned and implement the lessons on an ongoing basis without outside help. My main goal for the company this year is to set up ongoing processes, with data gathering and regular meetings, so that we can continually evaluate and improve our performance. It may be counter-intuitive, because people complain about it so much, but I feel that we need more bureaucracy. In large companies, organization can be stultifying. In my tiny company, where chaos has been the norm, my goal is to add routines, here and there, until we aren’t constantly reacting to disasters but rather making orderly plans for the future.

This leaves the question of whether I will recognize the next opportunity to get outside help and improve my situation. What’s a good way to figure out where we are weak? Should numbers be the only consideration? Or are there areas where most businesses could benefit from hiring a consultant?

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

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/why-i-am-not-going-to-renew-the-sales-consultant/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss Blog: An Owner Gets a Lesson In Managing Sales Reps

February 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment
She Owns It

Portraits of women entrepreneurs.

Susan Parker: Keeping the reps honest.Earl Wilson/The New York Times Susan Parker: Keeping the reps honest.

At the last meeting of the She Owns It business group, Beth Shaw, founder of YogaFit, wondered why her recently hired sales representative was not meeting expectations. As that conversation continued, Ms. Shaw came to see the importance of a good customer-relations management system. She also considered putting role-playing exercises in place for her sales representatives and setting clear goals for them — from Day 1.

During the same meeting, Susan Parker, who owns the dress maker Bari Jay, talked about her company’s approach to sales. She uses independent contractors who are paid on commission. They represent other brands as well, and travel from store to store. Additionally, Bari Jay has one salaried sales manager on the staff to oversee them.

Ms. Shaw asked Ms. Parker if she offered any sales incentives to her customer-service people.

No, Ms. Parker said, although she does give year-end bonuses when the company does well, and she also offers profit-sharing. “When you offer them a carrot, then they try to sabotage your road men to get those accounts themselves,” she said. For example, someone in customer service might report that a certain bridal shop had called, complaining about its sales representative. Seeing an opportunity, that person might then offer to handle the account.

“The other thing they do is, then they stop paying attention to some accounts because they don’t see a big commission opportunity,” said Deirdre Lord, who owns the Megawatt Hour.

Ms. Shaw asked Ms. Parker how she knew her shared sales representatives were out there actually trying to sell Bari Jay.

That is where her “phenomenal” sales manager comes in, Ms. Parker said. He was previously Bari Jay’s sales representative for the Northeast region. He retired from that role — he is in his 70s and sold Bari Jay for some 40 years — and Ms. Parker created the sales manager position for him in September.

“Good idea,” Ms. Lord said.

Initially, Ms. Parker said she wondered whether she needed him. She now says hiring him was “the best thing we’ve ever done.” He keeps the sales reps honest, she said, because they can’t argue with him.

For example, Ms. Parker thought one particular rep had a great year because his sales were up 15 percent. Her sales manager helped her put things into perspective. “He’s like, ‘Susan, he has like 100-and-something stores; he physically set foot in 30-something of them,’” she said. Those few stores were already Bari Jay customers. The others represent a huge missed opportunity. “It’s been a big learning curve for me,” she said.

Ms. Parker said her sales manager knew every angle. When he saw frequent orders for eight dresses, he began asking the reps why they were not pushing for larger orders. Stores that sell Bari Jay dresses get volume discounts. “If you buy 12, you get 40 percent; 18, you get 45 percent,” she said. “You buy the whole line, you get 50 percent off.” And the more dresses the sales reps put in a store, the more money they make. Still, they were not rising to the occasion. The manager wound up calling the stores himself. He learned from the thankful owners that they had not even been told about the discounts.

“So, he’s kind of doing their job for them,” Ms. Shaw said.

Ms. Parker acknowledged that Bari Jay needed to do some housecleaning. She let one sales rep go, but her sales manager does not recommend getting rid of everyone at once. “We kind of have to focus on one territory at a time,” she said.

You can follow Adriana Gardella on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/an-owner-gets-a-lesson-in-managing-sales-representatives/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,