Practice makes perfect

R.A. Mueller receives Progressive Distributor Sales Training Excellence Award

The Cincinnati fluid handling and pump distributor is recognized for its ongoing emphasis on sales training.

by Richard Vurva

When Kevin Delaney first become a pump distributor salesman, he had experience in inside sales, factory sales support, and some course work in marketing.

“This background helped greatly, but did not at all prepare me for the rigors of field sales,” Delaney says. “Marketing is taught in schools, but salesmanship is given scant attention.”

An engineer by training, most of what he learned early as a sales engineer came from the school of hard knocks and by voraciously reading whatever material he could find on the subject of salesmanship.

Today, as sales manager at fluid handling and pump distributor R. A. Mueller in Cincinnati, he oversees 10 outside account managers, eight inside sales engineers, two inside repair coordinators and four inside parts technicians.

“When I became a sales manager, I made up my mind not to put my people through what I went through,” he says. “I could help them get there a lot faster by giving them some sales training.”

Delaney’s dedication to providing ongoing sales training earned R. A. Mueller Progressive Distributor magazine’s annual Sales Training Excellence Award.

“As we became more successful and more profitable, I got busier and people got tired of listening to me,” he says. “That’s when I started to bring in outside people.”

He has utilized sales trainers including Jim Pancero Inc., Carl Henry of Henry Associates and Landy Chase of Rainmaker Associates.

“It helps going outside because most companies don’t have someone with the interest or ability to gather materials and conduct in-house instruction,” he says. “Secondly, there’s a lot more credibility bringing in an outside trainer.”

Because there is so much sales training material with different points of view, Delaney screens the content of speakers or trainers to make sure it coincides with his own sales philosophy.

“Many sales programs are based on hard-sell approaches that focus on overcoming objections and closing the orders,” he says. “Our business is based on long-term relationships. You cannot have a long-term relationship where the customer feels he has been strong-armed into buying your product. The training I subscribe to emphasizes planning, problem solving and excellent questioning and listening skills.”

Today, he utilizes a combination of professional training provided by Butler Learning Systems of Dayton, Ohio, and in-house programs.

The Butler programs include two to three days of intensive training, workbooks and videotaped role- playing opportunities.

More experienced salespeople attend Butler’s “Habit of Sales Negotiation Selling” and “Managing the Account for Win-Win Partnership” that teach them skills needed to sell at higher levels in a customer’s organization.

“Many salespeople are uncomfortable with the whole negotiations arena. They don’t know how to handle negotiation situations that customers pull them into,” he says.

Often, salespeople wait until the end of the sales process and then the transaction boils down to a haggle over price. This is because the buyer does not perceive any difference other than price. Delaney teaches his salespeople to structure their proposals to solve problems, and to sell the value of doing business with them right from the beginning.

“You have to be selling the customer on how he’s going to benefit by buying this particular product or service from us,” he says. “We offer a lot in terms of technical support, stocking and service. If we get to the end and it’s just a haggle over price, in my view, we haven’t really done our job.”

Selling to plant management isn’t about selling products, Delaney says. It’s selling an array of products and services and the value provided to the customer. In order to sell to higher-level managers, salespeople must become proficient at problem solving, dealing with operations and logistics issues, asset management issues such as storeroom rationalization, and helping customers cut their costs or improve equipment reliability.

“The value of what we do has to be sold to the management of these companies in a financial and plant operations context,” he says. “You can’t talk to them about product features and benefits, because they don’t care about product details.”

“We always share stories with one another,” says account manager Jim Baker. “We talk about why we lost this order or why we got that order. What did we do wrong? What did we do right?”

Often, they utilize books about sales as a launching point for training and discussion. About once a year, they devote a sales meeting to discussions about current sales and marketing books. In recent sessions, each salesperson received a copy of a sales-related book, such as “Co-opetition” by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff or “Enterprise: One to One” by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers.

Delaney prepares a list of questions and topics for discussion pertaining to the reading material.

“I randomly call on salespeople to present their answers and analysis of the different topics,” he says. “Then, we get a discussion going on different points of view.”

Delaney says distributors don’t have to spend a lot of money on sales training. To help reduce training costs, he convinced a key supplier, Goulds Pumps, to host many of the Butler Learning programs, enabling R.A. Mueller to share the cost with Goulds and other Goulds distributors.

The key to effective training is to offer it consistently, so salespeople have the opportunity to seek continual improvement. An added benefit: salespeople demonstrate greater loyalty and exhibit more pride if they know their company is willing to invest in their career development.

“If you do it consistently, after about four or five years, it’s remarkable what kind of change and improvement you see in people’s skills and their ability to do the job,” he says.

It also reflects on the bottom line. R.A. Mueller’s growth rate for the past five years has averaged 10 to 11 percent annually.

Baker says he has benefited from Delaney’s approach to sales training.