Preparation Is Worth Its Weight in Gold

I went out into the field, as part of one-on-one coaching, with a salesman from a large sales and distribution company that handled deodorants, cosmetics, shaving products, cleaning supplies and so on, and which in those years had also moved into pasta and soy milk.

We pulled up outside a good-sized minimarket in Haifa and, as I always do, I asked the salesman to tell me a little about the place (explaining that I'd like to know what I'm walking into...).

The guy tried to fob me off with vague stories along the lines of: "Look, it's a regular minimarket... nothing special..." Apparently he thought he could fool an "old wolf" who had done that very same job for years (on foot) and trained a few thousand salespeople before him...

"Do you know this customer or not?" I asked bluntly.

"Not really," he said. "I'm new on this route."

"And you want to walk in blind and start improvising?" I asked.

"What can I do?" he asked.

I said: "You could have done quite a lot before you got here, but let's not cry over spilled milk. Has anyone else in the company handled this customer before?"

"Yes," he said, and gave me the name of the guy who'd had the route before him.

"So call him right now and learn about the customer!" I demanded.

He called, and within a few minutes he'd learned:

A. That the main decision maker at this store is X.

B. That this customer is crazy about Maccabi Haifa (the local football club), and that's the only thing he's willing to talk about. If you don't follow the team, you don't exist as far as he's concerned.

C. That he doesn't buy his fusilli from us. He gets them from a competitor... and so on.

"Now are you ready?" I asked him.

"Yes. Now I'm ready," he said, and walked in to make one of the biggest and most beautiful sales I saw in that whole period...

The moral:

There is no substitute for preparing in advance. The habit of leaning on experience and improvising is, in my eyes, a real plague. Not only do you repeat the mistakes of the past, the conversation also turns generic, not tailored to the customer or to the specific situation.

The success rate is low anyway.

When you're going back to an existing or regular customer, the danger is double. Over time the customer feels you have nothing new to offer him, everything is predictable and boring. If a capable competitor walks in after you, he may open up new and intriguing possibilities for the customer, while zeroing in on your weak spots, and the road to winning that customer is already paved for him...