Do you know what your sales rep is up to? According to this cover story from BUILDER sibling ProSales, that rep is up to a lot as the nature of the business evolves.
Paul Evans remembers well the day he and a fellow BMC sales rep were about to call on a builder’s jobsite. Evans, BMC’s national VP of millwork and a longtime coach of sales techniques, smiled a teacher’s smile when the sales rep showed he had learned the importance of relationship selling by talking intimately about the builder, his family, his truck, and even the kinds of boots he wore. It’s no wonder, Evans thought, this sales rep was able to accomplish so quickly his main objective for visiting and then get clearance to take orders for several projects nearby.
So he told the rep: “That performance is a credit to the great personal relationship you’ve built.”
“Actually,” the rep replied, “I don’t know the builder. All the personal stuff came from his Facebook page.” They had done business for a year and never met.
“I then asked if the builder was OK with that,” Evans told ProSales recently. “The rep replied that not only was the builder OK with it, he preferred it. And in fact, the reason he’s doing business with us is because we’re so advanced in our systems we can communicate in this fashion.”
