A few weeks back, I read that, in a pair of recent surveys, 65% of Americans agree with the statement, “I am more intelligent than the average person.” It didn’t report how sales reps as a group scored, but my guess is that it would be far higher.
Confidence in your own specialness has been a crucial quality in a profession where, like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, you go out into the blue peddling your goods, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. But sometimes, deep in your career, you may find the customer stops smiling back. You lack the goods.
Our aim in this issue is to help you win sales in the Internet Age with more than a smile. We talked with experts and compiled a lot of practical tips—stuff as simple as building relationships through social media and using the internet to deepen your knowledge of building science. You’re still in a relationship business; only now, these relationships are nurtured differently.
But simply altering sales tactics won’t be enough for LBM dealers to prosper. In order to sell more and better, dealers need to ask themselves a fundamental question: Why am I in business?
Historically, construction supply dealers did two things: 1) procure stuff; and 2) sell that stuff. Customers came because you found ways to bring needed materials to a community, and you prospered by selling those goods at a higher price than what you paid to get them. The value of this procurement service didn’t matter; if lumber was cheap, you sold it cheap, and when its price—not the cost of your effort, mind you—went up, you could slap a higher price tag on it.
Relationships mattered because supply lines were unreliable and construction could get chaotic. Contractors bought regularly from you so that you could bail them out when they, your delivery crews, or the supply lines made mistakes.
Today, bar-code scanners, lean techniques, and routing software have dramatically improved our ability to deliver goods on time and in full. Unfortunately, the same technologies are being employed by new competitors who also feature a more robust delivery network (Amazon) or offer more stores and later hours (The Home Depot).
So, what’s a dealer to do? You know the answers: Solve customers’ problems and integrate yourself more deeply into their lives. Component manufacturing and project management are current examples. In the future, it could include lending heavy equipment. Leave transactional sales to machines and inside reps.
It’s going to take courage for many veteran OSRs and their employers to remake themselves and get reborn as modern salespeople. But we know from surveys that you believe you have the brains to do it. You just need the will.
