Supercharged Sell

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To be sure, Segal's tour may seem a bit crazy at first glance. Segal, an animated character himself, may have pushed the envelope when he decided to feature Monty, the gas hose, singing "Let's Get Flexible." But the tour produced results. Take the case of Barbara Bloecher, purchasing manager for FoodService Purchasing Cooperative, in Louisville, and a longtime gas-hose customer. A couple of months ago, a Dormont sales manager came to her office and took her on the multimedia tour. During the presentation Bloecher noticed the factory workers assembling faucets, a product she'd never realized Dormont carried. She also discovered that the company had introduced a new kind of coupling device--a piece that connects two hoses. The sales meeting lasted a bit longer than usual--about 45 minutes--but she didn't mind. "I felt in control of the meeting," says Bloecher, who could choose which 30-second segments of the 16-part presentation she wanted to see. The outcome? In addition to her usual gas-hose order, Bloecher spent a couple hundred dollars on faucets for one of her clients, a restaurant chain. "The chain will be opening many restaurants in the next few years and will order new faucets continually," she says.

Though Monty may not yet rival Mickey Mouse in the corporate-identity game, Segal is pleased with his--and his cartoon colleagues'--performance. "Most people compare themselves to competitors, but I benchmark against MTV and CNN," he jokes. He's in the process of putting the tour on CD-ROM so that his 300 manufacturer's representatives can use it with customers, too.

Getting customers inside the company, however, was only the beginning of Segal's foray into SFA. Now he needed to figure out how the technology could help him pinpoint the most lucrative places he should go outside it.

His partner and best friend, Stacy Brovitz, had learned from the software company that developed Dormont's central database that opportunity-management systems (OMSs) were designed for that very purpose. Heeding the software company's advice, Segal and Brovitz purchased a 10-user license for PowerPlay, an OMS from Cognos (800-426-4667; www.cognos.com), for about $10,000. "If the system helps your salespeople make good business decisions, as it did ours," says Segal, "you can recoup the cost, literally, in a week."

OMSs are highly evolved descendants of contact managers. Like their predecessors, they track company names, phone numbers, and meeting notes. But they go several steps further, helping salespeople identify untapped wells of revenues hidden in their existing accounts and then setting specific objectives for each customer. The systems do this by tracking everything from sales information on a macro level (say, by country) to specific product information by industry and even by customer. So, for example, if a sales manager notices that gas-hose connectors make up 70% of sales to large fast-food chains as a whole, he or she can drill down to the regional level and determine which regions aren't selling as many connectors as their counterparts.

Though he installed his OMS only about a year ago, Segal has already seen its benefits. Just five months ago, he noticed that a few large customers in certain territories around the country were spending considerably less than their same-industry counterparts in other regions. So he ran a report that itemized the products sold to each customer in the low-buying group, and in a matter of hours he spotted the weakness: while most of Dormont's large customers had been purchasing the company's newest product--a safety valve--in record numbers (nearly a million dollars' worth), the problem customers hadn't bought a single one. When Segal asked the reps for those customers the reason for the poor showing, he learned that he himself was the source of the problem: he'd been so caught up in pushing the newly patented product that he'd overlooked seemingly mundane details--like making sure all his reps had adequate samples to give to potential customers. He subsequently put together sample kits for each of the low-selling reps and also wrote up individual sales goals for them.

The insight went a long way: Segal's projections show that he'll sell 50% more safety valves this year than last. And overall, he says, he expects Dormont's revenues to shoot up by 25%--thanks to the implementation of the SFA system.

REVOLUTIONIZING SELLING

Kozell Boren, who is president and chairman of Gulf Industries, had no problem figuring out whom to sell to. The challenge for him was keeping customers interested once his salespeople had made a pitch.

For years Boren, the son of a Texas blacksmith, had thrown all his energy into manufacturing his signs and spent little time figuring out the best way to sell them. By 1992 Gulf Industries had become one of a handful of sign companies to perfect the use of Lexan (a material hard enough to withstand gunfire) in its sign making, but its salespeople were still using colored pencils and glue sticks. It wasn't until a year later that Boren discovered--almost accidentally--that technology would revolutionize how Gulf sold signs, just as Lexan had revolutionized how it made them.

Boren purchased his first laptop--an NEC 386 notebook computer costing $7,500--and the software package Corel Draw as a test: he wanted to see how computers could facilitate the design process. With the help of employees in the company's design center, he loaded Corel's off-the-shelf design program ($489; 800-772-6735; www.corel.com) and added a few of Gulf's basic sign configurations and fonts. A few months later, Boren handed the notebook to salesman Perry Powell and told him to use it when he called on customers. The length of Powell's sales calls quickly shrank from three hours to an hour, and within a few months he became the company's number one salesperson.

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