Who: George Flolo, General Manager, The Flolo Corp., Bensenville, Ill.

Branches: Five

Key Markets: Municipalities, industrial machinery, fabricated metal, rubber and plastic, food processing, paper products, chemical

Best Practice: Your people are accessible

From the customer's perspective, the quicker the answers come, the quicker the problem goes away. Accessibility leads to faster solutions.

For our best suppliers, we have the names of specific people that really go deep into the bowels of the organization and are responsive to our calls. If a salesman has a question about how a product works in a certain environment, he can call one of the supplier's application engineers and get an answer while he's standing in the customer's office.

With too many of our suppliers, getting an answer may take anywhere from 24 hours to two weeks. Sometimes you're forced to go through channels and your question gets shuffled up the line … or people are so busy they can't get back to you quickly … or they're hiding behind voicemail and not returning your call. It's just a tremendous waste of time, because now you have to make more calls to get the answer.

Knowing that we can get to the real experts to get the answer we need quickly is a real confidence booster for my salespeople when they're in front of the customer. And it frees up their time to go get new business because they only have to handle that transaction once.

We had a situation with a major customer who had a very large horsepower drive that failed because of a plant fire. We were able to work with our supplier to get a replacement system onsite and started up in only three days … practically unheard of turn-around time. That's when accessibility really counts: when you need to talk to someone immediately to verify that the right part is in stock or help you identify a substitute that can be used with minor modifications.

And we're not the only ones who notice whether or not a supplier is easy to do business with. Being accessible also builds the manufacturer's brand with our customers. When customers have a good image of the supplier, they may even specify them by name. It's not unusual for customers who've had good experiences with a particular line to gradually move all of their business to that supplier.

And it's not just accessibility to our suppliers' technical experts; it's the ability to get to decision-makers who can make things happen. One of our municipality customers went to a consulting firm on the West Coast to design a new wastewater facility. After the customer saw the preliminary specs, they came to us because the drive supplier they'd been most satisfied with was not included in the list of brands.

Even though the spec rewriting process takes weeks, we had to get the ball rolling quickly — and that takes immediate access to the very highest levels. With one phone call, we were able to work with the manufacturer's national sales manager and product managers to schedule a sales call on the consultant. Within two days, we'd managed to start a dialogue to get that supplier added to the specs so we'll be able to quote on their products.

If the supplier makes it easy to deal with them, you know we'll go back to them the next time — and push business their way whenever we can. If they're not — well, lack of responsiveness on a technical problem with a particular product just cost one of our suppliers all of their business at a food-processing plant, about $150,000 a year. We've managed to keep that customer's business, but we're switching to other brands to do it.

The bottom line: Today, a quality product is simply a given. Pre- and post-sales support is what really differentiates manufacturers for both distributors and the customer.