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I’ve been riding and working with many DSRs lately and have noticed (way too often) that they’re blaming just about everybody they work with on the problems that happened this week or last week when they’re talking to the customers. Some DSRs even use the blame excuse thinking a customer is going to feel sorry for them and buy more from them… It Does Not Work That Way!!
When watching the customers’ reactions, almost every time I see the same look that I received when I was in my second year of selling… they’re like, isn’t that your job Dave? Aren’t you supposed to be taking care of that? Why are you blaming everybody else? They don’t really say that, but you could see the look in their eye, like, really?
I used to mentally wonder to myself when I was sitting with customers, why they (my company) didn’t fix these stupid problems? They would happen over and over every week. One time I had a customer say, “THEY WHO??? You keep saying THEY, don’t you know your company is just a tax entity! You and the others at work there are the brains of the company. YOU are the THEY!”
DSRs talk about it all the time, so stop complaining and do something about it! My customer was right.
So, I did, and it worked! You must believe in the product and the service you’re selling. You must believe in the company you’re selling for. You need to believe that every person that works with you at the company can do their job.
To be more successful and reach your personal and business goals, you need to praise your products and every person you work with. The most successful DSRs in the industry truly believe in their products and in their company and they go out and tell everybody, even those that will never buy from them (heck, they are so proud of their company, they even tell non-food industry people about how great their company is).
I have concluded that foodservice distribution is such a fast-moving business (because our customers already need more supplies, which is great) that most distributors don’t ever have an extra person to focus on any kind of future planning, like how they could do things differently, so the same problems don’t keep happening. It’s nobody’s job to sit around and think about stuff like that.
We’re recommending that, DSRs, since you understand the business you’re in and it affects you daily in your job, that you take an active role in helping solve the problems that affect you, your customers, and your company. This will help the company you work for move forward and grow, which helps everybody. Make sure you do this in a proactive way, such as suggesting ideas on how problems might be solved. Don’t go in like I used to do the first couple of years and browbeat everybody to death to the point where nobody really wanted to work with me at all.
DSRs, Be a Resource…and Sell Something!
