He Knew His Customers

When I started training at a big, well-known food company, I decided to go out into the field with one of the salespeople as part of learning the business and preparing the workshop. I do that a lot.

As you'd expect, they paired me with the best salesman in the company... the one who handled the institutional market (catering, hotels, restaurants and the like).

He took me to a large educational institution (a boarding school) up north, walked straight into the purchasing manager's office and closed a nice order with him.

I was not impressed, to put it mildly. In my "school", salespeople build relationships with all the decision makers. Or at least they try. I expected him to use the visit to connect with the chef, the senior kitchen staff and so on (for a long list of important reasons I won't go into here), and my salesman settles for the purchasing manager and leaves...

I made a point of keeping my mouth shut. After all, I'd come to learn the secrets of the trade, not to coach the salesman.

Right after that, the same salesman took me to a big kibbutz dining hall, and there he went straight to the chef. You could tell they were friends, and he agreed on a few purchases with him. Then he met (in the same dining hall) with the dining hall manager himself, an ultra-Orthodox man, and told him in great detail about the vort (a short Torah talk) he'd heard at his synagogue... Finally he sat down with the steward and brought him up to date on the order the chef had placed.

When we walked out, I couldn't hold back any longer and asked him: "Why, at the first place, did you focus on the purchasing guy, and at the second you started with the chef and then moved on to the others in a particular order?"

"Because I know my customers well," he answered. "At the first place, the buyer is very dominant. If he'd caught me huddling with the chef 'behind his back', he'd have thrown me down the stairs... At the second place, the chef is the one who decides, the dining hall manager waits all week to hear the sermon from me, and the purchasing guy is just a clerk who does the paperwork for the order!"

"Hats off to you!" I said, and I meant it.

During the courses that followed, it wasn't hard to see that this guy was the real deal, selling far more than anyone else on the team.