Are you bulletproof?

It’s all about price.

Or at least, in my world, it used to be.

The first ‘big’ job in my career was as Marketing Director for a discount off licence chain. I started there in ’99 and later went on to be Managing Director.

In 2006, along with my fellow Directors, I led a Management Buy Out backed by Private Equity money. That was ￡63.5m of borrowing, about a year or so before the wheels came off the economy. Ouch.

In retrospect that sounds scarier than it was when we were living it.

Those years saw a lot of businesses go to the wall.

But we didn’t.

We thrived.

More than a little of our success was because we were good at buying, but I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to claim credit for that buying prowess.

I wasn’t (and am not) a trained buyer – one of my fellow Directors had that skillset and background. He was a real ‘street fighter’ in his approach and our procurement team reflected his style; we were renowned in the industry for being hard, uncompromising, and implacably committed to achieving our goals.

We knew what we were doing, and we were ruthlessly committed to our vision.

Against that backdrop we grew a discount-led business in an already heavily commoditised market during a period of catastrophic economic slowdown. We had to be ‘good’ at buying to get the right prices. It was, as mentioned, all about price. So, being ‘good’ at buying -to our way of thinking- often meant being intransigent and probably (in hindsight) a bit unreasonable. Maybe a bit predatory.

Were we total bastards?

It may sound like we were total bastards to deal with. Some of our suppliers probably thought so.

But there’s a good reason we behaved that way.

As a franchisor, we felt that we had a moral and commercial responsibility to our franchisees -who were mostly small businesses in their own right- to ensure that we provided them with the best possible prices, advertising, and a proven route to market that meant that they, in turn, could make a living.

That moral duty to deliver the best for our franchisees pushed our buyers on to new levels of … robustness … in their approach.

We used to joke that we kept our buyers in darkened rooms, feeding them a staple diet of raw meat and Red Bull, only letting them out into daylight when yet another trembling supplier needed to have his or her throat ripped out.

I say ‘joke’, but that kind of humour reveals the business culture we had at the time.

Funnily enough, the manufacturers, vendors, and brand owners would only send the best and the brightest of their ‘National Account Managers’ (aka - ‘salespeople’) to see us …

An aside here … why is it that the only people who ever seem to have ‘sales’ written on their cards are Sales Directors and, at a push, Sales Managers? The only ones prepared to even admit to being ‘in sales’ are the ones who, largely, no longer actually do any selling … could it be that people are embarrassed or ashamed about being in sales? Isn’t it a sad indictment of the profession that sales, (the business function without which NOTHING HAPPENS), has such a bad reputation that people are ashamed of it?

… The best and the brightest Account Managers would either become our friends (aka - they would give us what we wanted), or we would enter hard negotiations until they became, if not friends, at least allies (aka – they would give us what we wanted).

But then, every now and again, we would come across a National Account Manager who could manage meetings with us in a way that we were ill-equipped to deal with.

Let me say that again.

There were salespeople that even our battle-hardened buyers were not equipped to deal with.

They were sophisticated, had a process that they stuck to, and were disarmingly honest about their products, services, and abilities.

Frustratingly, we found it almost impossible to get everything our own way with these people – certainly we could never achieve the kind of deep-cut discounting we would normally demand as a matter of course from our other suppliers.

And the most annoying thing?

We couldn’t even really get properly angry with them. They were so damn reasonable and fair about it. We always knew where we stood and, if we wanted to do business them, we had to agree to an equitable relationship.

We dubbed these National Account Managers ‘bulletproof’.

The Bulletproof Salesperson.

It didn’t matter what bullets we tried to fire, none of them hit home. It didn’t matter what angle we tried; they had already closed it down in advance. They were clear, concise, and totally fair in their approach. We always knew exactly where we stood.

We were in their system instead of them being in ours.

Other Account Managers would turn up with endless PowerPoint presentations, showing off the features and benefits of all the latest stuff that they wanted us to buy.

The bulletproof salespeople didn’t seem to know what PowerPoint was. They would turn up with a notebook, a pen, a bunch of intelligent questions and then, only when they had somehow got us to explain exactly what we needed, they would make a proposal.

Or not.

Some of them wouldn't even give us a proposal. They would say things like, “we can’t help you” or “we don’t have anything that fits your model” or “for us, it’s not all about price; it looks like it’s not going to be possible to do business together”.

It was counter intuitive.

We ended up chasing them asking them to allow us to list the products in our shops because we discovered, to our genuine surprise, it wasn’t just about price.

Of course, price mattered, but no matter how important price was to us; sometimes it was also about having the right products to drive our franchisees’ businesses.

Twenty Years On.

It’s now twenty years after I started working at that company, and over a decade on from the Management Buy Out. I left that amazing business in 2012 and I now know that those ‘bulletproof’ National Account Managers were Sandler Trained salespeople.

I am now privileged to help other businesses to develop a new way of working with their customers – establishing equitable buyer-seller interactions and ending the dysfunctional and one-sided relationships that are, regrettably, the norm for a lot of businesses.

If you sell anything for a living and you would like to not only be proud to put the word ‘sales’ on your business card, but also you would like to know how to be bulletproof when facing a any buyer, particularly a feral one, maybe we should be having a conversation.

Comment below with “I’D LIKE TO BE BULLETPROOF” and I will contact you to discuss further.