HYDRONICS


HEATING HELP What a rep should be


BY DAN HOLOHAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER


He grimaced and said, “Everyone with a telephone.” And that got me thinking. A long time ago, I worked for a rep for 19 years. That


I 36


was my basic training. I was in their customer service department for a bunch of those years, and I probably took 100 calls a day. No one ever called just to say hello; nearly all the calls that I took were from crazed New York wholesalers who were either looking for their stuff or asking me to identify some antique part. Calls from homeowners were unheard of, and I hardly heard from the contractors. We sold to the wholesalers. They were our customers. It was a simple time. After a while, my boss decided to send me out on the


road to talk to the hundreds of mom-and-pop fuel oil dealers that dotted the Isle of Long. These folks bought from the wholesalers, and we weren’t very close to them. My boss figured that if I could make these people feel good about us by teaching them for free, they just might ask for our stuff by name when they went to their wholesalers. So I knocked on doors and told the oil dealers about


what we had. I’d take stuff apart and put it together. They, in turn, would tell me what they thought about what we had, how it was working for them, why they bought or didn’t buy; that’s how I learned about the real world. I’d talk to their techs off the backs of pickup trucks in


oil-soaked garages, over cold pizzas and beers. I know I learned more from listening to those techs than they learned from my teaching. As I went from place to place, I shared what I had learned from those techs with other techs; that is how I came to be a teacher. I wrote stories about these people in a newsletter that


we called “The Problem Solver.” We sent it to more than 5,000 people each month. They liked it; that is how I came to be a writer. My buddy at the manufacturer told me how busy they


were and how their arms were getting sore from picking up the phones all day long. “Seriously,” I said, “who’s calling?” “Everyone,” he said. “They’re all calling!” That seemed so strange to me. “What about your reps?”


I asked. “Shouldn’t they be taking those calls? When I was a rep, the scariest thing in the world for us was the thought that a customer might call the manufacturer. If the customer was calling the manufacturer, why would the manufacturer need us?” He nodded, but had nothing more to say about this. When I was a rep, our customer was the wholesaler, and


we were hell bent on pulling through sales to those wholesalers by helping and teaching the contractors for free, all in the hope that the contractors would do the right thing and ask for our stuff by name. And it worked. My old boss used to pound into my thick skull the truth that we had two categories of customers, the


was visiting a manufacturer’s place and chatting with a buddy who is in charge of their customer service department. I asked him who was calling these days.


Jim’s attitude is that everyone else’s problems are Yates’s opportunities. He doesn’t just have the products; he also has these passionate people and that wonderful, old school attitude that says there’s no need to call the factory; we have everything you need right here. Everything.


wholesalers and the manufacturers we represented. Our job was to delight them both. We delighted the wholesalers by bringing them business that they may not have gotten if it were not for the help that we were giving their customers, the contractors. We delighted the manufacturers by meeting or exceeding our quotas and by making sure that the wholesalers (or anyone else) never, ever called them. Today, manufacturers’ Web sites and their social


networking, along with their toll-free numbers seem to be changing things. I think the reason why we’re seeing this is because many manufacturers are starting to wonder about their reps. Are the reps adding the value they used to add? Should we be paying them as much as we’re paying them? I think that any rep that encourages his customers to call a factory has lost his mind and will probably also lose that manufacturer as a customer. There are exceptions, however, and I am always


delighted to run into one of them. The Lovely Marianne and I were in Timonium, Maryland, last fall, doing the Dead Men’s Steam School. A few days before we left home, N.H. Yates Inc. invited us to stop by their place for a visit. They were sending five people to the seminar and were within walking distance of the hotel where we were staying, so we accepted. The more you visit people, the more you can learn. Jim Yates, the president of this magnificent, old school


rep firm, spent a couple of hours showing us around and just chatting with us. That touched me because I’m sure that Jim had other things to do that morning. I tend to ask a lot of questions and drag out conversations because I’m curious, and I really like people, but I’m also a good listener. When stuff goes into my head, it churns around with other stuff that’s already in there. What came out of our visit to Yates was this thought about reps and what makes for a great one. Jim was telling me about other people’s problems, but


e Turn to HOLOHAN on p 38


phc january 2011 www.phcnews.com


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