Sales makes it Happen

by Gerry Egan

"It may be time to ‘fire’ some vendors." Part I

I reached a point many years ago where I stopped thinking in terms of vendors as companies and began thinking in terms of individual vendor sales reps. I did so based on what’s sometimes known as the Pareto principle, (commonly referred to as the 80/20 rule). Management experts also call it the law of the critical few and the trivial many and it basically posits that in any given enterprise, the majority of the results are produced or driven by a relatively small percentage of the efforts or input. Many experienced sales managers will testify to seeing it at work in their sales organizations.

If you understand and accept that, it's not hard to extrapolate that in any given vendor, a relatively small percentage of the sales force, (20%, perhaps), produce the majority of the sales. That means that the majority of the sales force, (perhaps 80%), are --at best-- average performers, and produce a relatively small portion of the sales.

How this affects us is that when we promise to be 'the vendor's leasing program' we are, in effect, promising to work with the whole company, all the salespeople, the good ones and the bad ones, promising to work on whatever they call us with, whether or not they are transactions we personally would have chosen to work on or know we can get funded. So, we risk spending a lot of time chasing undoable deals to satisfy our commitment to the 80% of the sales force, (the average performers), who are producing the smallest portion of the sales.

The 80% group, the average performers, can take a lot of your time, too. They’re not that busy so spending time shopping rates is easy for them. And not having a lot of good prospects they’re more than willing to spend limitless time on any kind of prospect they do have and are glad for you to do the same.

Instead, I chose to focus on vendors not as companies but as individual reps and developed close personal relationships with the top performers in each vendor's office. The interesting thing is, once I changed how I looked at that, it became very easy to do.

When you work with the just the top performers, you get to run marketing programs targeting just the customers you think you can approve. And another thing, the top performers can work with anyone they want to. Nobody questions them. Average salespeople are expected to work the company approved plan; top performers are allowed a lot of leeway.

This was all so easy to learn and so easy to work. The hardest part was making the decision to change, to differentiate myself. I maintain that if you had a close working relationship with the just the top salesperson at ten different vendors, you'd have trouble keeping up with the business. And guess which salespeople in the vendor's office last longest in tough times? In any typical vendor sales organization of ten salespeople, I'd gladly give anyone else full access to the bottom eight performers if you'd just let me keep the top two.

In Part II "How to do it"

See you in Atlanta!!!!!!!!

Gerry Egan

www.LearnLeasing.com
Phone: 919-790-1266
Email: GerryEgan@LearnLeasing.com

In sales we get paid the same for a maybe as we get paid for a no ---but a maybe takes longer to collect.

Gerry Egan since 1981 has been involved in Equipment Leasing training, education, and has written many articles. He is unique in his consulting profession as " We broker leases, hold our own leases and discount leases to local banks in addition to managing and servicing the leasing programs for a couple of small banks."

About Gerry Egan:
http://forequipmentleasing.com/Joomla/content/view/25/45/

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