One of My Favorite 'Lessons from the Field'

So, A little over a week ago I surveyed my network asking which topics you'd like me to write on moving forward, One option was "The restaurants I remember" a second was "Tales from the field" and the last was essentially "None of the above". My "Restaurants I remember" ending up winning the poll and it is something I intend to start on a monthly basis - The concept being essentially writing a monthly review on the most memorable restaurants (the ones I remember) each month as I complete my expense reports. I will do this as my travel returns to normal and I have good content, but for today I'm going to go ahead and share a "Tale from the Field" that touches on the concepts of Being yourself and Being Creative that I've spoken about in prior Articles.

For this tale, I'm not going to name the end customer or the distributor rep that I was working with at that time. For background, I'll just share that the customer was an OEM machine builder in the Packaging equipment space and the Distributor Partner was a long time partner of the HMI product line I represented at the time. The general region could be described as the 'Upper Midwest' of the United States.

So, this story is set quite a few years ago - I was representing what at the time was a pretty revolutionary HMI product. It allowed the customer to run multiple driver instances at once at a time when this was really rare (in order to communicate to multiple controllers on the machine), it also had some of the most advanced graphics available at the time, it allowed the incorporation of multimedia tools like embedded videos for support and training of the operators, and finally it had built in tools for building 21CFR11 compliant applications for pharma and other life science applications. Frankly, many of these features would still make the product competitive today!

The local distributor had identified a key target prospect that seemed to need everything we had: They produced a range of packaging machines and the Pharmaceutical industry was one of their targets. The 'E-Signatures' capability in support of 21CFR11 compliance was likely overkill for some of their secondary packaging machines but would certainly add value for their primary packaging machine products. The graphic look and feel of our product was Night & Day compared to the Flat 2D buttons in 3 or 4 colors that their current application looked like. They also had some machines that incorporated a separate PLC and Motion Controller and had Independent HMI's for the functions controlled by each. This should be a SLAM DUNK! - Our HMI was more expensive than either of the 2 they were using on this machine, but it was Less expensive than Both of them and it offered better performance and significantly improved usability for the operators.

At this point both the Local distributor guy and myself were pretty experienced - we knew that it would take multiple visits to convert this prospect to a customer and that changes like this don't happen quickly and sometimes you even have to wait till the next generation machine design occurs because OEMs tend to only make running changes if they have a significant problem (Quality, Delivery, Reliability, or Cost) with the incumbent vendor's product. So, we embarked upon our efforts to introduce our SUPERIOR product to the Engineering team. This customer was only a Monthly cycle of visits for the myself and the distributor partner. Everything seemed to be going well - The prospect acknowledged all of the pain points that we referenced - they seemed to truly understand our advantages and only seemed to object to the "Sunk Cost" dilemma - They had so much invested in training of their team in the existing product and so many reusable screens and elements that they saw a transition as expensive and lengthy. We tried to mitigate some of these concerns by offering to convert some of their applications - to provide essentially engineering services for free!

Our visits continued: Month in and Month out we were welcomed by the customer. We addressed every question, every concern and every issue - yet, they still continued on our rotation of 'Prospect Visits' not 'Customer Visits'. After about a year of this, I sat down with the Distributor Guy and we came up with a creative plan to push this one over the edge! Some of you are familiar with the concept of the "Pain Chain" and finding out how Pain resonates throughout an organization so that you can build as complete a picture of the costs and pains that an organization feels from a particular pain point. We looked at ours and found that the Marketing team seemed to have a high concentration of the pain points involved - The lack of Multi-Language support in their current application, the poor operator training, the 'Old School' look and feel, the lack of multimedia sizzle, and poor to no compliance with 21CFR11 all pointed to a lot of measurable pain that would land at this companies Vice President of Marketing!

The following month, I was pumped to hear from the distributor guy that we had a meeting scheduled with the VP Marketing. It was a fantastic meeting! We had a year of dialog with the VP Engineering to know the key ins and outs with this company's pain points and we showed the VP Marketing how to solve them all while building significant differentiation for their machines in the marketplace. "Distributor Guy" and I felt pretty awesome leaving this meeting - When the VP Marketing starts to put the screws to the VP Engineering, he was sure to have a change of heart and actually start to move on a conversion to our products.

Our plan seemed to be working, the VP Marketing started pinging the VP Engineering on changing their HMI to make their machines more competitive! We had opened some good dialog with the VP Marketing and it sure felt like we were finally pushing this one over the edge. Then it happened --- The VP Sales invited us in for a meeting on our solutions!!! We were both excited to join this call ... We were sure that this was going to be the meeting where we finally got the go ahead on a machine design that included our product ... Except it wasn't!

The VP Engineering sat us down and the Lit into us! He was livid that we would go around him on what was an "Engineering Decision" and get his counterpart the VP of Marketing working against him. He let us both know that he'd never use our product and may never do business with either of us again!

This story is a great example of two principles that I've written on before: The first, "Be Creative" is obvious - The distributor guy and I were very creative in finding a way to make sure the organization understood the value we were offering - We actually succeeded in delivering that message so well that we'd actually created a pretty strong internal champion who went to bat for us! --- What we hadn't considered and what wasn't fully developed in my understanding and methodology at that point in my career was the concept of "Nothing in the Dark of Night". Imagine if we'd run the concept of presenting to marketing by the VP Engineering instead of going around him: I suspect that he may still have been angry and may have even shut this conversation down before we ever had it ... BUT, He would have never been as angry as he was because we would have communicated our intentions to him before executing! In this case, we may have never had the opportunity to present to the VP Marketing, but we probably would have kept the doors open with the VP Engineering! It's hard to know for sure, but I think if we'd kept that door open - we would have eventually won a machine design at this OEM.

So this story incorporates and underlines two of my key sales principles: Nothing in the Dark of Night and Be Creative. It also illustrates how the principles often work together and ignoring one in favor of another can be a huge risk! I never did sell the VP Engineering from that OEM anything - I'm not sure about the Distributor in the story - being local they may have been able to repair the relationship ... but I just never checked back! Which is in itself another point worthy of discussion: You have to be able to accept rejection and move on!