By Steven Crain, Apache Hose & Belting

Being a consultative seller really means being a digger—digging deep to find the real problem.

We're trying to become consultants, to help the customer discover what he really needs, not just what he thinks he needs. That means making the transition from just selling something…to solving problems…to being proactive about solving problems before they happen. We're really working to make this a point of differentiation for our company.

In the old way of doing business, Joe Salesman shows up at the customer's back door with a box of donuts, goes into the maintenance room and tells the same fish stories to the same guys he's been talking to for the past decade or more. Eventually he'll get around to talking about product—usually when the customer initiates the discussion—and then ask that killer question, "You don't really want to buy anything today, do you?"

In the new way of doing business, Joe goes in the front door for an appointment with the CFO to talk about overall savings. He's developed a relationship with the vice president of purchasing, not just the buyer. He knows who to go to in the accounts payable department to get a check if there's a problem.

We used to call it selling up; today they call it consultative selling. Fundamentally it means that my sales guy can roll up his sleeves and get down on his knees with the grease monkey in the corner to fix something but is equally comfortable talking to a vice president. He has a relationship with everyone in the building, so he knows who to go to no matter what the issue.

It takes a different type of person to do this; in my experience, only about 3 percent of salespeople in the industrial arena are consultative sellers. To make the switch, you need to either hire guys who can do it or change the mindset of the guys you've got. To be honest, sometimes it's a lot easier to find someone new, because the experienced ones don't see a reason to change.

Being a consultative seller requires planning ahead: when you're calling on executive management, you can't just drop in. It requires a tremendous amount of pre-call planning and research, so you really understand the customer's big picture: his business' scope, his challenges, his mission. As a result, you end up investing much more time in a single customer.

But the ultimate carrot is, it really works. If you make these changes, you'll sell more, now and in the future. Consultative selling has helped us build customer loyalty, creating opportunities for future wins. And the payoff from being a consultative seller extends far beyond more sales.

Our sales people are much better informed about their territories and that information trickles down through our company. We've found that the reports we're getting from the field are so much more insightful, so much more valuable for our business planning. And now that we have a whole network within the customer, we know who to call.

There's a real payoff for our suppliers as well, in the richness of the information we can share with them. It's amazing how little many manufacturers know about how and where their products are being used. We now have extensive applications and end-user information and more accurate market data we can share with them for their use in evaluating the market, business planning and developing new products and applications.

We win, our suppliers win…our customer wins most of all. As we help him solve problems, we've increased his uptime and decreased his overall cost. We know the customer's mission and every detail about every process in his plant, so now he's got a "go-to" guy to solve all of his problems, not just problems that impact the products we sell. For our OEM customers, we've become a very valuable resource to an understaffed engineering department—and today, most of them are understaffed.

When done well, consultative selling can turn up opportunities you never dreamed might exist. We had a customer that we'd called on for 15 years; we were pretty confident that our outside sales guy had whittled away at them until we had the vast majority of their business.

We had an opportunity to call on corporate, so I made appointments with the CEO, CFO, vice president of operations and director of engineering. And from talking to this larger group of people, we discovered that we were getting less than 10 percent of the business that we could legitimately handle.

Our salesman now calls on the whole company, from top to bottom. By using this approach, we've grown our annual business with them from $20,000 to $300,000.

The bottom line:

You can't call on just one or two people at a customer. There are always sleepers out there; consultative selling is the best way to wake them up.

Steven Crain is president & CEO of Apache Hose & Belting, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

By Bob Casazza and Joe Burgess, Koyo Corp. of USA

Like most of us, our customers are doing more with less; downsized maintenance and engineering departments means they are doing more work with fewer resources. Suppliers who take away the customer's pain are the ones who will get their business.

A customer's time is precious. They want and need help identifying their needs and figuring out how to solve their problems. Distributors or manufacturers who merely take orders will quickly find themselves replaced by a supplier who truly adds value.

Too often distributors are so focused on the potential sale, they don't take the time to ask themselves or their customers whether they are selling the right solution. If a customer is buying a lot of bearings, the tendency is to keep selling them parts, without questioning why frequent failures are occurring.

Successful vendors take the time to sit down with the customer to get the specifics on the problem, review other contributing factors and offer solid solutions.

Once a customer knows you can offer solutions, you can take the up-front transaction price out of the equation. Whether you call it consultative selling or just finding the pain, taking genuine interest in the customer's needs means you will get that critical first call from users looking for solutions.

We had a customer that had experienced continuous bearing failure on a key process over a period of two years. The problem developed when the company switched from one raw material to another, requiring the machines to operate almost 50 percent faster and causing the bearings to fail.

As a first step to developing a solution, we made a joint sales call with the distributor servicing the account to examine the failed parts. We discovered electrical fluting, something that couldn't have been diagnosed over the phone. Together, we listened to the customer's maintenance manager and discovered that he needed a drop-in solution with a simple implementation to minimize cost and down time.

Based on our review, together with the distributor we were able to specify and install a ceramic-hybrid bearing that could sustain higher operating speeds and eliminate electrical fluting. The new product has eliminated premature failure, decreasing the customer's downtime and maintenance costs by at least two thirds. Even though that bearing costs more than six times as much as the product it replaced, the significant decline in overall maintenance costs have cut the customer's total cost.

The bottom line:

When distributors really make the time to understand the customer's pain, everyone benefits—the customer, the distributor and us.

Bob Casazza is industrial aftermarket development manager and Joe Burgess is territory manager of Koyo Corp. of USA, Westlake, Ohio.