Just collecting such information gave the sales team a new perspective: some customers were so focused on price, they weren't worth the effort. Patrevito invited one longtime customer to lunch to tell him that Booklet Binding wouldn't be bidding on his business. "Are you telling me you're firing me?" the man said, shocked. "I've never had a vendor do that."
The tools the salespeople acquired helped them regain the feeling that they were in control. There was a calendar log, enabling them to preplan with customers. "This is the saddle-stitching job we did last year at this time," the salesperson would say, scanning the document. "Will we be doing it again this year?" "It says, 'I thought about you before I came in the door." Landiak notes. There was the "red-alert" program, designed to attract business during every bindery's seasonally slow period, from May through early July: salespeople would offer printers a discount to commit to a job well in advance. Along the way, as the sales team helped him identify problems, Landiak created other new processes: an estimate-history form to count how many quotes a given customer had asked for; a pending-project log, so that salespeople could alert others in the company to a job, even if it wasn't coming live for months.
To boost accountability, each salesperson also drew up an annual business plan, which included specific goals, such as increasing business with a specific customer by 50%, and personal goals, such as buying a house. Patrevito's own vow was to master Italian. "My attempts have been earnest, but my results rather feeble," he says in fluent English. On a quarterly basis, salespeople were expected to sit down with their customers and fill out a report card on Booklet Binding's performance. It would ask, Are you finding the information I send you -- on building a marketing plan, or customer service -- helpful? What are our plans for next year? "What you're doing is identifying the customers with the most potential, and understanding their businesses extraordinarily well," says Landiak. "Then you're making sure that they understand that you understand."
Week by week, prodded by the individualized "action steps" they were supposed to take, salespeople like Bill Chalifoux started retraining themselves and their customers. Instead of just making a bid and hoping for the best, Chalifoux would listen to the customer describe a job. Then he would draft a letter recounting the details, "to show I listened" -- reminding them, say, of his idea to switch to a smaller box to cut down on postage -- without mentioning a price. Then he'd talk with them to make sure both parties understood each other. Then came a second letter, which included a price at the bottom. "We've earned their confidence, which is worth something," Chalifoux explains. His colleague Al Autin stopped talking about the bindery at his first meeting with a customer. "I listen, then I tell them, 'I'll go back and put together a program based on your needs," he says. No longer does he get bogged down answering the kind of routine questions that make Booklet Binding sound like every other bindery: How many pockets on your stitcher? How quick a turnaround could you give me on 10,000 16-pagers?
By October 1994, when the classes were through, most members of the sales crew were better prepared and better organized. Some were even penetrating higher levels of authority within their customers' ranks. But those kinds of conversations meant fielding harder questions about specific capabilities. "We said we were experts, but we weren't," admits Patrevito. Maybe, he thought, we could get plant workers to teach the salespeople about the bindery's different disciplines: the folding foreman could lecture on folding; the plant manager could sermonize on saddle stitching. But there seemed to be too many snags: How would they make the time to do it? What if the workers weren't good teachers?
No, it wouldn't work. Somehow, the salespeople would have to turn themselves into experts.
* * *
"I barbecued him," brags Larry Bralich, displaying a hint of sadistic pleasure. "He got on a topic I knew -- postal regulations -- and said things I knew were way wrong." Next to him, Bill Chalifoux, who has just been described in terms normally reserved for poultry, ducks none of the shame. "Other people I could fool," he says. "I couldn't fool Larry."
Chalifoux, like every other salesperson, had been assigned a topic area -- in his case, fulfillment, mailing, and personalization -- and had been given eight weeks to become an expert in it. To demonstrate his mastery, he had to deliver a two-hour presentation, complete with handouts, in front of his peers, including the company's experts. "I felt bad after I did it," says Bralich of the way he turned the heat up on his colleague. Not half as bad, probably, as Tom Ashcraft felt after his presentation on folding. When Phil Moreno had asked a question, Ashcraft snapped, "Why do you need to know that?" Later he viewed his performance on videotape while in bed, cringing. "That was all the critique I needed," he says.
In thinking about how to build expertise into his sales team, Patrevito had mumbled something that proved to be wiser than he realized: "The best way to learn is to teach somebody else." So he and Landiak drew up a list of different aspects of the "finishing" business, the industry term for the functions Booklet Binding performs: saddle stitching, perfect binding, mailing, cutting, customer service, scheduling, estimating, and so on. Landiak created a general outline for each one -- What is paper folding, and how is it done? What's the configuration of rollers on a folding machine? What type of folding do we do better than anybody? -- and Patrevito assigned the topics to individuals and groups, starting in the spring of 1994.
The salespeople's research culminated in the two-hour stint in front of their peers, including in-house experts on the topic. Karin Hoffman, one of the company's first employees, was part of a group that created a takeoff on Reader's Digest, teaching about customer service under such familiar headings as Laughter, the Best Medicine, and Points to Ponder. A group studying estimating came up with a Jeopardy-style game in which the first prize consisted of steak knives -- a detail borrowed from Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet's scathing 1984 play about real estate salesmen. "It was genius inspired by bourbon," says estimator Bob Krueger.
