I’d been with our distributor in Moscow for several days.
There were four reasons for my visit: first so that they could learn more about
our products, second so I could learn more about how they operated as a
company, third so that my colleague and I could make a presentation to Russian
architects at the British Embassy, and fourth to identify ways in which my
presence would help them to sell more of my product. The company had offices in
a number of Russian cities, from St. Petersburg to Tomsk, and then south to
Krasnodar on the Black Sea and into Ukraine, and occasionally several of their
regional staff would fly into Moscow for management meetings and company
presentations. These were useful gatherings that really helped in putting
across the key selling points of the products that they were distributing for
us.
I was driven from the airport straight to a meeting with one
of their major clients. On arrival we sat in a waiting room with a number of
competitive companies, all of us hoping to win the right to supply flooring
products to their new offices. I was armed with my briefcase containing a
couple of brochures and some technical leaflets, and my distributor carried
just one of our blue carpet tiles. Our three competitors had arrived with
trolley loads of samples with which to bamboozle and impress this prestigious
customer, so I felt decidedly under-prepared!
However, selling isn’t just about the number and variety of
things that you are able to show, it’s about grabbing the customer’s attention
and holding it while you convey the reasons why a) they should buy your products,
and b) why they should buy from your company. Too many salespeople try and sell
everything and anything in their portfolios, but that can often signal lack of
confidence to the buyer, who would prefer that the products presented are both
fit for purpose, readily available, and offered at a good price. So with my one
tile, my file of technical leaflets, and my experience of our range of
products, I was able to make a good pitch. It must have been okay because I was
invited to meet them again the following day and show them a few more of our
samples, and we went on to win some business from them.
The experience showed me that although there was no doubt we
were working with the best distributor of commercial interior products in
Russia, there were still deficiencies in the way they presented our products.
And that led me to wondering what other things were maybe not being said. On my
penultimate day with the distributor I asked to see their warehouse on the
pretext that I wanted to see the conditions in which our products were stored.
When they seemed a little evasive about that my request turned into more of a
demand, and by the following morning had metamorphosed into a determination to
take a taxi out there if they didn’t take me themselves!
So we arrived at their warehouse en route to the airport,
and it was more like a cold storage unit. Absolutely freezing, and not the best
conditions in which to hold our pallets of carpet tiles. There were two things
that were immediately obvious on entering the building. The first was that our
products were lost among multiple pallets of products from a competitor whom we
were supposed to have replaced. The second was that some of the pallets that we
had supplied had broken, and this had caused damage to some of our products.
That was entirely our fault because the pallets were not sturdy enough, and we
were able to correct the situation. The distributor went on to sell a lot of
carpet tiles for us after that visit, and on later visits it became clear that
our products were their product of preference, even though they continued to
sell for our competitors.
TRAINING OUR RUSSIAN
DISTRIBUTOR IN MANCHESTER 2003
Part of the reason for that success was that we invited ten
of their managers over to Manchester for three days of product and sales
training, which their MD was delighted to support. Those few days gave us the
opportunity to present the technical and aesthetic properties of our products
in detail, without interruption, and to demonstrate methods that we employed
both in winning specifications for our products in commercial buildings, and in
maximising the profitability of each project. We had employed a superb
interpreter, thanks to a reference from UK Trade & Investment, and she
overheard one of the group saying “we have never been taught to sell like this
before”. That team went on to become the company’s most important export
distributor in the following year.
So the main messages from this are that you should be
prepared both to know as much as possible your distributor’s operations, and to
empower them to sell your product to maximum effect. In this case, a little
investment went a very long way!
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