This Year's Model

Forty-eight hours with today's prototype of the superstar salesperson

Dawn in Alabama on Interstate 65. Heading north to an 8:30 appointment in Russellville, leaving Birmingham in the mist.

That's Craig Ohlson behind the wheel, driving a blue Ford Bronco with beige leather seats, tinted glass, power windows, and a bug shield mounted on the hood. Ohlson used to drive a Nissan -- until he figured out why folks around the woodyard at the Champion paper company were giving him hostile looks. Ohlson is a salesman, see, and Champion is his biggest account. A salesperson knows (or soon learns) that when you're selling to American manufacturers, it's a good policy to buy from American manufacturers.

Stowed in the console between the front seats are a few necessities of the road: a black-plastic coffee mug (steam escaping from the sippy hole), four loose sticks of chewing gum, a cellular telephone. The dash is clear -- no radar detector -- which is surprising. But that's another thing a salesperson knows: without a radar detector, if you get pulled over (and when you drive 30,000 country miles a year, you will get pulled over), there's a chance you can talk your way out of a ticket; with a radar detector, no way. In the backseat is Ohlson's planner, a zippered leather number the size of a briefcase. In the way-back are his overnight bag and his catalogs, so many vinyl-covered loose-leaf binders filled with page after page of numbing spec sheets and cryptic drawings of pumps, valves, filters, and cylinders, Ohlson's stock in trade.

Ohlson does his selling for Activation, a $30-million distributor of hydraulic and pneumatic components in Birmingham. He came to Activation seven years ago from a similar company in Omaha. Ohlson was 23 years old at the time, ambitious, already bored with inside sales ("I can't stand to sit at a desk, day after day, all year long"), mechanically gifted but wary of repair work ("I didn't want to be getting dirty all the time, either"), and looking for a breakout opportunity in the fluid-power industry. Activation put Ohlson on a $25,000 guarantee and carved out a new territory for him straddling the border between Mississippi and Alabama, up on the Tennessee line.

Those were bleak, depressing days. For Ohlson, who was raised in tiny Westbrook, Minn., there was first of all the language barrier to overcome. "How do you spell that?" Ohlson had asked near the end of his first encounter with a genuine Deep South purchasing agent, this after twice hearing the man pronounce his name. "Su meeeith!" Three syllables. "S-M-I-T-H." Ohlson had some leads -- everybody in his territory who had bought anything from Activation in the past two years -- but the leads were cold. "You don't understand me," one former customer told him. "I will never buy a damn thing from Activation!" Others had nothing against Activation, they just weren't buying, no thanks, not right now. Sometimes it was Ohlson who terminated the relationship, such as when he made a lifestyle decision early on to avoid poultry processors. "Too filthy, too raw. The realm of the Bubbas," he says, noting particularly the Bubbas who wear raincoats to work and slit chickens' throats all day.

Soon, though, Ohlson caught a break. Early in December 1988, two months into the job, he took a "gimme" order for two hydraulic motors at $36,000 apiece. A gimme is a gift from God, a purchase order that flies in through the window and lands in your lap. Ohlson knew nothing about those motors and even less about the customer who ordered them -- but, hey, that's a gimme, you don't say no. "That's when I learned what commission was all about," he says.

That gimme got him going. "At some point during the first six months, he started to hit," says Dick Brus, Activation's president. "He's been going upwards and onwards ever since." In 1989, Ohlson's first full year, he broke $500,000 in sales; in 1991 he topped $800,000; in 1993 he did more than $1 million. Today he's the undisputed star of Activation's 32-man sales force, the youngest member of the President's Club ($250,000 in profits for the company), and his own soaring line on the sales graph that's part of the training program for every new hire. Brus, who's 57 years old and already looking ahead, calls Ohlson "presidential material."

Ohlson loves hearing that. He's ambitious. He wants to be a sales manager one day; after that, who knows? On the other hand, he's in no particular hurry to leave the front lines. He's a rare case in his profession, having come to sales by choice, not because something else didn't work out. His father sold insurance for a living. Ohlson knew he didn't want exactly that ("I have the door slammed in my face enough as it is"), but selling and the life it brings -- variety, independence, freedom from manual labor, a shot at making some real money -- always appealed to him and still do.

Part of what makes Ohlson so successful, says Brus, is his "ability to empathize with customers." Now, the concept of empathy as it applies to the arcane realm of fluid power has to do only in a secondary way with emotional needs, although Ohlson pays attention to those, too. Like any successful salesperson, no matter what the product is, Ohlson remembers names, returns phone calls, smiles a lot, is sensitive to pecking orders, takes office politics very seriously, and knows when you're having a bad day without having to be told.

All of that still matters, of course, but maybe not as much as it used to, not in the new world of selling. What makes Ohlson a special salesman is the depth of his business empathy. That means drawing on a deep reservoir of technical knowledge. It means talking less and listening more. It means making his customers' problems -- the cash-flow crises, the order backlogs, the inventory-management issues -- his own and finding sales opportunities in problem solving. It means, essentially, becoming a consultant, the kind Ohlson's sales manager, Tom Griffies, would describe as "a sustaining resource to the customer."