The Mheda Journal

For the last two days, I’ve been immersed in the world of Sales Success Stories, our annual series of case studies of unique sales and product applications completed by material handling equipment distributors. Although the general consensus seems to be that not a lot of sales were made last year, I was definitely impressed by some of the deals MHEDA members were able to bring home.

There was the one that featured 27 modular containers in excess of $4 million. There was the $600,000 one that came together in a crazy 48-hour window. There’s the $500,000 pallet rack installation that required inventive hose storage. Those are only a few. I think readers are going to find this year’s edition of Sales Success Stories both informative and encouraging. The market is still there if we look hard enough.

Another thing that always comes to mind when working on these stories, and it’s amazing that it still happens seven years in, is how many other industries rely on the material handling industry to operate. Just in this year’s stories, the clients range from automotive parts to a bakery to a furniture store to an electronics importer to a cold storage operation to a steel mill. It really just runs the gamut.

So keep your eyes pealed for the Sales Success Stories, which will be published in the Fourth Quarter issue on October 15. And you never know, some may be appearing at www.themhedajournal.org before then!

The responses continue to roll in from MHEDA Members listed on manufacturer Top Dealers list. To add to my list from last week, here’s a couple more strategies from MHEDA members who were able to achieve some success in 2009, despite the down economy.

• “Our objective was to provide exceptional service and continue to build relationships with customers. Achieving that objective involved increasing our number of repeat customers, improving customer survey results, responding to customers’ needs during the initial contact, reducing the amount of required rework and overall improving processes.”
• “We directed our sales force to specific SICs and used the entire company to become regarded as a ‘valuable’ supplier for our customers. In short, we made it our business to understand our customers’ business and respond quickly to their demands. By doing so, we exceeded pre-set objectives for 2009.”
• “We began to look for industries that had severe pressure on them, such as building supplies and automotive, and tightened credit to those customers. It caused some angst, but it helped keep our bad debt expenses in line.”

As I mentioned last week, the July issue of The MHEDA Journal is chock-full of strategies from Top Dealers. I don’t want to leave anyone out, so if you won an award from your manufacturer, send me a message at editor@themhedajournal.org or leave a comment here to inform me!

Made it back to the office today, and I have a lot of notes to go through. I will be diving into some of the topics I came across for the next several posts. First, I want to go back to a session I attended on Tuesday and make a few quick comments. 

I’m not in sales — and frankly have no real interest in being involved in sales – so I was surprised that I got so much out of Tom Reilly’s “Value-Added Selling” general session. I even had the chance to attend his breakout workshop, which he ran along with MHEDA Member Cary Roulet, VP/GM of Holt of California (Sacramento, CA), and picked up a few useful tidbits.

The official workshop title was “Crushing Price Objections,” and basically it featured tips and strategies for dealing with a customer who says “Your price is too high.” There was a list of about 16 different statements that salespeople hear from customers talking about price. One of Reilly’s biggest points was that most price objections aren’t really about price, they’re about the customer’s expectations. For instance, when a customer hears a price that he deems “too high,” he is probably not considering all the added value that comes with the product. He expects to hear a number that is close to what he has determined he is willing to pay, and if it is different, the natural response is to say, “Your price is too high.” The real problem, according to Reilly, is not necessarily with your prices but with what the customer is expecting.

I’m probably not explaining this very well since it’s not a situation that I run into every day. But it home when he said, “Money is a better conversation to have with customers than price.” I kind of considered them to be the same thing, bu they’re not.

Money is a bigger, long-term issue. Price is what you pay one time, a short term concept. Money is the total amount you spend, whcih includes the sales price, the service costs, warranty costs, etc. That, Reilly says, is how distributors can add value and drive profitabilty. The total cost of what distributors provide is really what matters. When explained well by your salespeople, no customer can argue with that. You’ll never hear, “Your value is too high.”

It goes to show that you never know what you’re going to pick up at a MHEDA Convention. Sometimes you find nuggets even when you’re not really expecting to.

Well, folks, another quarterly cycle is complete. We’re putting the final dots on the i’s and crosses on the t’s for the October 2009 issue of The MHEDA Journal. It goes to the printer on Monday, so it will still be a few weeks before it’s ready, but I’m already really excited about this issue!

This year, as we’ve done in Fourth Quarter issues past, the focus is on Distributor-Manufacturer Relationships. Even in the down economy, MHEDA Members were able to make sales…we’ve got more than 20 Sales Success Stories, plus 12 more tips from manufacturers and distributors on what makes a good partnership. I’ll give you more info as the publish date closes in, but I couldn’t keep it under wraps any more!

Once again this year, the Fourth Quarter issue of The MHEDA Journal is all about Sales Success Stories. We debated doing them this year, thinking that “sales success” and 2009 don’t belong in the same sentence. Ultimately, though, that’s why we decided to go ahead with them. Companies that have had sales successes throughout the last 12 months really have accomplished something, and the techniques they used may be even more helpful than normal to other MHEDA members.

So that’s our rationale. And so far, I’m glad we’ve decided to press forward. I’ve heard great stories from members about all the different ways they’ve convinced customers to buy. I’ve been surprised to learn, in many cases, that the customers have approached the distributors more so than in years past. 

Whatever the case, I wish continued success, sales or otherwise, to all of you out there. I hope I have a chance to share one of your stories!