Stop singing the supplier sales meeting blues

Is your sales staff tired of attending boring supplier lectures? Here are a few ways to perk up supplier sales meetings.

by Rich Vurva

You know a supplier sales meeting isn’t going well when the presenter is talking about sales opportunities in Tennessee, but your company is located in South Carolina. One industrial distributor remembers sitting through a sales meeting where the supplier was so confused and unprepared he forgot what state he was in. The presenter quickly lost all credibility and his audience began to fidget in their chairs and wish they were somewhere else.

A primary reason distributor salespeople dislike attending sales meetings with suppliers is when the sales rep leading the session seems to be in a state of confusion. Or when the presenter is boring, long-winded and unfocused.

Some meetings are so dull it’s hard for salespeople to pay attention. Sheila Welus, a safety specialist for industrial distributor IDG headquartered in Atlanta, admits to briefly falling asleep during one meeting where the presenter droned on. The presenter got bogged down in technical jargon and offered little practical advice to help salespeople sell.

“Instead, they introduce a product without providing information on where or how it should be used,” says Welus. “Target market information would help us get their product out faster and in more places.”

The purpose of a sales meeting with a supplier is to get the distributor sales staff ready to sell. All too often, sales meetings turn out to be uninspiring lectures and redundant time wasters. The key to a successful sales meeting is to make it interesting, useful and positive. Here are a few tips distributors might want to pass along to suppliers before they schedule their next get together.

Grab their attention
There’s nothing worse than listening to a supplier read from a prepared text. When Madison, Wis.-based Wiedenbeck Inc. salespeople started grumbling about attending monthly supplier meetings, Jim Wiedenbeck pumped up the excitement by asking suppliers to bring products to demonstrate.

“Paging through a book is just about worthless. I want suppliers to bring in products so we can go out into the warehouse and try them out,” he says.

Salespeople hate product information overload. Rodin Lazada of SCN Industrial in Toronto remembers one three-day meeting where the presenter’s information was so technical the salespeople tuned out for the entire three days.

“It was a complete waste of time for everybody involved. Presenters tend to concentrate too much on the technical aspects of their product and forget to tell you how to market it and who to sell it to,” he says.

Another of Lazada’s pet peeves is when suppliers spend too much time selling salespeople on the benefits of their company’s products. “We’ve already bought into it. Instead, describe the markets we should be going after, how it compares to competitors and how to sell it,” he says.

Offer specific selling tips
Instead of bogging salespeople down with technical details, tell them the best methods of getting prospects and customers to try the new product. Salespeople don’t always know where to look for new sales and welcome advice on how to spot specific product application opportunities.

“The time that we can spend in front of a customer is limited. Sometimes, if we don’t have access to the plant floor, we don’t know what they’re doing and what products they’re using. We need help from suppliers to know more about how to look for opportunities,” Welus says.

Presenters need to understand the marketplace the distributor serves, says Ken Berger of Netherland Rubber Company in Cincinnati. Specific market knowledge helps salespeople locate prospects for a new product. It also helps the presenter avoid spending valuable time on a product with limited appeal to the distributor’s customer base.

“Give people some ideas of where you’ve had success with your product. Let us know the types of questions to ask so we can better help our customers with your products,” Berger says.

Share success stories
If someone from your sales staff has had success selling a particular product, invite them to share their experience. Praising salespeople for a job well done reinforces positive behavior and encourages everyone to do well. Pick the story several days before the meeting and give the salesperson some guidelines to tell his or her story. How did they make the first contact? What competitor’s product did you go up against? What was right about it and what was wrong about that product? What did the sales rep do right and wrong? Who helped in the sale?

Practical advice and success stories are much more effective than technical presentations.

Debbie Pace, a senior inside account executive for MSC Industrial Supply in New York, dislikes presenters who use technical jargon that salespeople don’t understand. “Explain it in laymen’s terms,” she says.

Minimize the sales hype. Keep the presentation factual by focusing on how a product can help solve a customer’s problems. Customers don’t care how much a sale will line the sales rep’s pockets, so teach reps how to demonstrate the ways the product will lower the customer’s costs or improve their profitability.

Set goals and objectives
Make sure everyone in the meeting knows what you’re trying to accomplish. Is the purpose of the meeting to introduce a new product? Explain a supplier’s promotional campaign? Teach salespeople how to conduct an onsite audit at an end-user facility?

Never call a meeting and expect salespeople to come with the right frame of mind if they don’t have a clue what the meeting is about. Insist that suppliers stick to the topic at hand, and don’t allow sales reps to veer off topic.

“I’m getting more specific as to what I want suppliers to do. I want them to concentrate on a product. A lot of them have broad product lines, so I ask them to concentrate on a specific product. I want salespeople to learn as much as they can on a single product rather than a little bit about many products,” says Wiedenbeck.

Finally, have an agenda and stick to it.

“Without an agenda, presenters tend to wander from one thing to the next,” says Roe Fuselier of Gator Supply in Harvey, La.

Following an agenda helps ensure that meetings start and end on time.

Supplier sales meetings don’t need to be a waste of time. If your salespeople don’t look forward to the meetings you have with suppliers, maybe it’s time to put some of these ideas to work so you can stop singing the supplier sales meeting blues.

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