Losing the Luster

I was consulting with a distributor client the other day. In the process, I interviewed each territory manager to gauge their depth of understanding of their jobs and assess their ability to help their dealers grow and prosper.

This distributor is a growing operation with three pretty good territory managers, one of whom I have had the honor to teach in a territory manager school run by the manufacturer the distributor represents.  He is a good man, sharp as can be, and has a great future ahead of him.  His dealers are fortunate to have him in their corners.

In our one-on-one session, he made a statement that nearly knocked me out of my chair. He said, “Wow, lately, I’ve found it harder and harder to sell our company’s value-add!  Price is becoming a bigger and bigger issue each week!”

If you are a territory manager for a distributor, you may have felt the same thing lately.  If so, perhaps the thoughts I shared with this territory manager’s distributor may inspire you to reframe your challenge.

What Every Sales Professional Sales

It does not matter what you sell-air conditioning equipment, investments, sweet corn, houses-sales professionals don’t sell things.  They sell feelings.  Any person who is going to buy something wants to obtain a thing that will do what he or she hopes it will do.  But at the core of the process is the feelings of the buyer-the buyer wants those feelings to be enhanced, to be improved, by the transaction.  And this is true of air conditioning contractors too.  Most territory managers don’t understand that.  They think their dealers are gruff people, like charging bulls in an Irish crystal store.  But even the crustiest contractor has, at the core of his buying decision process, a strong mix of feelings that must be properly handled for him or her to feel good about doing business with a distributor.

(A counterexample can help illustrate this point.  How often have you bought something from a sales person you did not trust, from someone you did not feel good about? If you went ahead and bought the thing anyway, you probably regretted it later, right?)

When a territory manager asks good questions to get to the emotional roots of a dealer’s motivation, he has the information he needs to align his value-add proposition to the dealer’s emotional needs and establish a solid basis for a strong relationship.  When a territory manager fails to find the emotional roots, his value-add proposition loses much (if not all) of its power.

Here’s a simple but effective example to show the point.  Suppose you had a pet goldfish that became ill.  Concerned, you take the little fellow to a veterinarian and she says you need to put three drops of a special medicine in his water every day for 10 days.  You are relieved and ask how much the medicine is.  The vet says $800.  You do a double-take!  A new goldfish would cost less than $10.  Sure, you like Elmer, but do you care that much about the little piscine?

But if your son or daughter developed a rare form of cancer and the cure would cost a million dollars, you would not hesitate five seconds to start the cure, would you? There is a whole lot more of emotional investment in a child than a goldfish!

When a territory manager forgets this, he or she runs the risk of making his offering of products and services irrelevant to the contractor. The value-add loses its luster.  Price then becomes more of an issue, a bone of contention.

Learn how to ask powerful questions to get to the real root, the emotional root, of a dealer’s cluster of problems.  You may find the books linked to these titles to be helpful:

• SPIN Selling by Neal Rackham

• Escaping the Price-Drive Sale by Tom Snyder and Kevin Kearns

(But be warned-the techniques taught in these books are immensely powerful, but not easy to master , at least at first.)

You may also find some of my workshops (click here) to be of help to you as well.

I’d be interested in hearing from you if you are a territory manager struggling right now with promoting your value-add.  What obstacles are you finding in your way?  Where do you want to take your relationship with your accounts?