STRATEGIES & ANALYSIS

Business Corner

can’t handle all the accounts you’re assigned if you become and effective systems seller.

Roughly 80 percent of profit generating sales are made by 20 percent or less of the sales population. Over the course of my career two sales individuals who I had the distinct pleasure of managing, or should I say had the pleasure of watching them manage me, were Carl Peraino and Walt Pascoe.

The two are as different as night and day in terms of personality. Carl is an outgoing and gregarious, ‘ hail-fellow-well-met’ kind of guy. One you might meet at a party and say later, “I really like that guy Carl, he’s entertaining and I think he may have some substance under all that bluster.” Walt, on the other hand, came out of the lab where he was a technical director and would be considered a complete ‘ wallflower’ at this hypothetical party. He was somewhat bashful and lacked much of a sense of humor as well.

What these two had in common was
the ability to system sell. They both
set sales records however they were
able to set these sales records in par-
allel with also setting the highest prof-
its per sale in the process. When I tell
people about these two star salesmen,
I refer to the “The Peraino or Pascoe
Model.”
When I first started to manage
Walt, I asked him to defend his low
calls per customer ratio. At the time
he was averaging one call per day
where the other 11 sales persons aver-
aged almost three per day. Walt simply
referred to the records, which said he
was selling 30 percent of the division’s
revenue at 49 percent gross margin
while the other 11 were selling the
remaining 70 percent at 38 percent
gross profit. It wasn’t too long after
this encounter that I began traveling
with Walt to learn how he did it.

The Peraino model was very similar. I hired Carl on a trial basis and 14

months later, he was salesman of the year for my division as well as the whole corporation and contributing the highest per sale profits of any of the 32 national sales people. What was Carl’s call frequency? He actually averaged less than one call per day.

So what can these two diametrically opposite personalities—the extrovert and the introvert—have in common that made them so successful? They both had a passion to understand and to become wise in what each of their core customers goals/objectives were from the top to the bottom of these organizations, and they were analytical.

Most of all, as system sellers, they both knew that they must position themselves as the vital ingredient in the selling process. That is, they knew to be ultra-successful, no other individual could hold the epicenter position except the systems seller.

Additionally, there were key tactics they understood, such as: • In industrial products where there is a multiplicity of customer positions that can block or enhance the sales process, as a system seller, they could handle only 10-17 accounts;

• As a system seller they must spend a 12/1 ratio of preparation to sales persuasion time;

• As a system seller they would “live” with an account at every customer position until they knew the overall organization better than any one individual in that target account; and • They could, therefore, speak to all issues within that account from plant production, marketing, finance, inventory, to the customer’s problems and issues with their own customers downstream.

Here’s one example. Carl saw a South Carolina Japanese transplant company producing airbag housing, instrument panels, center consuls and arm rests among other components.

They were using more than $2 million annually of a Japanese coating. Carl saw this as an enormous opportunity for his company. So where did Carl start the system selling process? One might think the purchasing department would make sense or the plant engineering manager, or the paint line supervisor. No, Carl started on the second shift when he drove around to the back of the plant about lunch break time to speak with the workers on the paint line. At first he simply stated and mused aloud about how difficult it’s going to be to crack this account and he let the workers fill him in on the elements most critical to being successful from their vantage point.

During the first visit he gleaned critical intelligence not just in what they said but who had the best view of the political ins and outs and how others have failed.

The second visit Carl brought coffee and the local bakery’s best pastries along with a few choice cigars. More information flowed and by the fourth visit, one of the key workers suggested that Carl should bring in a couple of five gallon pails and run against the incumbent just to “take a look.” Carl’s product outperformed the competitor in several aspects including the all-important piece-cost reduction.

The second shift foreman unofficially showed his results with to the first shift foreman who decided to run a similar bank of products to compare consistency. Results were very similar, so the two foremen took their collective results up the line and eventually told purchasing they were changing to Carl’s product.