Shipping office services, helpline, consultancy and supply chain security

Friday 14 December 2012

TALES FROM THE ROAD 16: YOU DON’T ALWAYS HAVE TO LIKE WHO YOU WORK WITH, BUT IT DOES HELP!



Charlie Bates. That was his name. It has taken me about six months to remember the name to the (rather red) face that I am not likely to forget! Relationships are everything in business, and I am glad to have a reasonably good instinct when it comes to forming and developing key business relationships. I have achieved that in multiple countries and across cultures, making many good friends along the way. And where friendships have not developed there has generally been the kind of connection and mutual respect that leads other people to actively want to do business with you. 

One of my longstanding clients once had a need to locate a very specific type of woodworking machine and asked for my help.  I had been out of the business for some years but said I would see if I could find one through any of the machinery dealers I used to work with. As part of that process I phoned a dealer in St. Louis USA. I had not spoken to him for about eight years, yet he still had my name in his phone and answered with a warm “Hey John! Good to hear from you!” It taught me a lot about communicating and making your connections work. It’s something that doesn’t happen overnight.

Conversely, it was poor communication and an inability on my part to connect which ultimately caused my relationship with Charlie Bates to break down! Charlie was a Sales Agent for one of our US distributors. He took a commission on machines that he sold on their behalf. The woodworking machines that we manufactured in Windermere were complex machines, albeit based on simple principles. Charlie had understood enough to sell a machine line to a woodworking company in Johnstown Pennsylvania. It was a high speed spindle turning machine linked to an automatic sander.

The machine had developed a teething problem and after several telephone conversations with both the distributor and Charlie, I felt the best thing was to take an engineer with me to resolve any issues. That went down very well and Charlie said to me that he felt it would ‘take the heat off the situation’, which has something of an ironic ring to it! Everything was very cordial, polite and positive and we had agreed to meet Charlie en route from Pittsburgh Airport to Johnstown. It was late in the day when we arrived, and being British we managed to get lost on straight roads. This all happened pre-mobile phones, and as there was no way of contacting Charlie we drove directly to the hotel, imagining that he would put two and two together and find us there.

My only direct communication with Charlie regarding the hotel had been to pass on details through the distributor of where we were staying, and we knew that he had received that information. So we assumed he would eventually meet us there. After an hour or so of settling into the bar, we started to get a little peckish, and as the restaurant was scheduled to close at 9pm we ordered. Still no Charlie, so we pressed on. About half way through our meal, this incandescent, red-faced ball of fire appeared at the end of our table bombarding me with accusations of giving him the wrong directions, with a peppering of expletives thrown in! So I let Charlie rant on for a while before eventually pointing out that actually he had been to Johnstown before, he had been to see the customer to complete the sale, and he would have had to drive past the hotel en route. Furthermore, I was British and had never previously been to Johnstown yet I managed to arrive at the hotel several hours before him. Poor Charlie wouldn’t let it go, and carried on with this endless and illogical public attack for so long that by the time he had finished the restaurant had stopped serving. When he realised, I offered him a French fry. I expect that wasn’t entirely helpful.

Although we then didn’t share a table for breakfast the next morning, we seemed to work well enough as a team to resolve the customer’s technical problem and had the machine line running perfectly by the time we left late in the afternoon. Yet if Charlie and I passed a dozen words between us that day, it is probably an exaggeration. At least we were both professional enough to know that the relationship that each of us had with our customer was paramount, and hatchets can be buried whenever a job needs to be done.

These two extremes demonstrate that while people do business with people, sometimes people just don’t get on. There have been instances where I have visited customers and made a good impact where previous salespeople have failed, and there have been others where I have failed where others have succeeded. Relationships are everything in business.

No comments:

Post a Comment