A good local salad

So, the food on the road is addictive. You’re stuck in a car for hours driving across vast and beautiful, but at times, monotonous landscapes, occasionally interrupted with a truck stop that has every sort of junk food imaginable. Rico likes the Combos and I like to steal Rico’s Combos. BK was on a Sour Patch Kids Exploders kick for a while. Caleb once bought a fifty-dollar container of beef jerky. Everyone is addicted to the white cheddar popcorn.

We try to eat healthy but it’s tough. You can snake a yogurt and banana from the hotel as you head out the door, but those don’t age well on the road. The fruit in the truck stop always seems to be in too proximity to the premade egg salad sandwiches and are simply rejected for association. If you stop at a local place, you could get something more wholesome like Caleb’s beloved horseshoe. Then again, you may not. You don’t always know what you’ll get in some of these places, but you always know what you’ll get at Arby’s.

Occasionally, the road food was just too much for Kevin. On a trip to Phoenix, he told us he knew a local place with a great salad, and he wanted to eat there because the salad would be healthier than the junk we normally eat. We drove down the road and exited where he told us. Pulling into the lot, we realized his “local place” with the good salad was Cracker Barrel.

Road food is easy. It’s a cop-out. We could work a little harder and get better food, but the junk on the road is just easier. Low nutrition? Yes. But easy.

Kevin had more discipline than us younger guys, but even he would give in occasionally. “Give me some of that popcorn, Richard” he’d yell from the back seat. Being on the road itself was part of Kevin’s discipline. He would travel the highways visiting dealers and assuring them of strong support for their selling efforts. He would carry example marketing pieces and thumb drives full of files. Kevin was bringing sustenance, nourishment and long-term value to the dealer. Unlike the junk food of marketing which is and always will be discounts.

Kevin hated discounts the same way he hated snack cakes. Oh sure, they look really pretty with all that frilly icing, but they have exactly no nourishment and you’ll feel like crap later. You just ate 800 calories of garbage that does not fill you up when you could have had a sandwich with a beer or even just a few beers. But no, you took the easy way out and bought the snack cake.

For Kevin, discounts were the easy way out that you’ll pay for later. They look nice and are awfully enticing as a quick fix but the benefit is fleeting. Kevin actually did compare a discount structure to smoking crack. “Every time you do it, you just have to have a little more,” he’d say.

But like that snack cake we left under the rental car seat, discounts will be around forever. While overused, they’re necessary in the marketing business. You have to eat and sometimes all there is to eat is a snack cake.

Kevin worked incredibly hard to reduce an addiction to discounts. He moved production dates to minimize the previous year’s inventory. He used added value programs which included accessories, upgrades and services to drive purchase rather than offers of price reduction. He also used new product introductions and new yearly models to get the price in line where discounts would be less of the sales pitch.

It was no easy task. Discounts are attractive and selling without them (or much less of them) requires discipline. For starters, you only recognize the financial impact of a discount when the product is sold. This is different than doing a better job communicating and demonstrating the product-- things that require upfront costs, and the skill to effectively implement them, with no guarantee of sale. Also, selling by way of discount does not require then same understanding of the product, market or customer. The need for intellectual and emotional engagement of the market is far less.

The more snack cakes you eat, the less nutrition you’re getting. Eventually, the lack of vital nutrients is going to cause you real problems. You can likely get by with whatever your body has stored up, but eventually you’re going to die from scurvy or some other 16-century pirate disease. The same goes for using discounts as the driver of sales activity. You can likely get by on existing brand equity and customer affinity, but over time the coming generation of purchasers will only know you as the product that’s “cheaper”.

Kevin’s philosophy was to move the organization from a mostly push philosophy to a mostly pull philosophy. In a push philosophy, mush of the effort is made to “push” inventory into the distribution channel. This means everything from up-revising their forecasts to stuffing the “rental” fleet. And because dealers are no slouches, they want serous discounts to take on the liability of added inventory. Inventory that, like the snack cake, might be with them for a while.

 Kevin’s partial solution to this was to shift to a pull orientation. This pull strategy would use the marketing process to entice customer interest first and then pull inventory through the distribution channel. This method lowers required dealer inventory, allows for better forecasting based on the status of prospects and reduces the needed number of discounts to make the sale to both dealer and customer. It was an artful dance and required a huge amount of discipline and defense.

All this is not to say Kevin did not use discounts. He did. But even when he did, he was measured and strategic. Rather than using broad based programs, he’d often target people who had shown real progress in the selling process and use a special offer to get the sale in by a certain time. He was also very mindful that dealers could make money. He loved the dealers dearly and cared about their businesses greatly. He wanted them to make money and preserve the value of the machines they sell over time.

“These smokehouse almonds are like smoking crack.”

Kevin did have a weakness for the smokehouse almonds and if there was a package near him, he’d probably eat them whether he wanted to or not. We’d be careful to buy just a few little bags when stopping and I’d keep the unopened ones up in the passenger seat with me lest he eat them all like a cow with wet corn in the feedlot. 

“Stop eating those,” I’d holler. “You’re going to get sick and at the very least, you smell like you use liquid smoke for aftershave” (a compliment to Kevin as he loved liquid smoke).

“I know a place we can stop for a good salad. A local one. And there’s one every five exits for the next 100 miles.“

"You’re Not Getting Any of This Are you Richard" is the story of one remarkable salesman, marketer, leader and friend told by those who worked by his side for years. It’s a collection of raucous accounts, emotional stories and needed lessons to inspire hearts, instruct minds and incite laughter.