There was the time I was supposed to book my first order. I was 23 years old and working for Motorola at the time. It was supposed to be a simple thing, just needing me to drive to an account, hand over a quote and get a purchase order for some MOSFETs. This was the perfect way to get a sales engineer, fresh out of training, an easy win.
This is how it went. I drove my company car over to a small power supply company in Branford, Connecticut. It was the first time I had ever been on a sales call alone, and I wore a suit and tie. I think I carried a Samsonite briefcase with me. Inside that briefcase was a folder with one piece of paper in it which was the quote necessary to book the order for the semiconductors we were selling. All I had to do was hand the buyer the paper, and then he would give me an order for the parts in question. Easy.
The buyer’s name was John, he was a big burly guy in his late 40’s. He’d worked there most of his career, and he stalked around the building like he owned the place. John met me in the lobby, shook my hand, and then escorted me through a maze of cubes to his office near the factory floor. This was one of those places that had caution signs posted in hallways and mirrors high up on the walls so you could see if a cart was barreling toward you. OSHA would have been proud.
John sat me down in a chair across from his desk and eyed me carefully.
“Where’s the quote?”
I pulled the paper from my briefcase and handed it to him. He looked at it for a moment, grunted, and then reached around his desk to some shelves where he pulled out a thick, bound computer printout. As a quick aside, I should point out that this was 1986, so there was very little (if any) “looking things up” on a computer screen. In fact, I do not think there was even a keyboard in his office. John opened the printout and began thumbing through it, running his finger down a column until he came to a part number. He took out a red pen and drew a line under the device name and extended the line across the page. He grunted again.
“You’re too high. I need you to do better.” He said, leaning across the marked up list.
This was not going according to plan. John was supposed to thank me and give me a P.O. I had no idea how to lower a price, or even if I could. So I sat there just looking at him. Some sales guy I was.
John said, “I’m going to go get a cup of coffee. I just looked it up. Your competitor is cheaper. You think about a better price. If you give me that price, you get the order. Tell me when I get back.”
And he left, leaving the printout with its big red line and, what I now knew was my competitor’s price, open on his desk. All I had to do was get up and take a look. He was practically telling me to do so.
But I’m stubborn. I sat there, not moving, wondering how it could fall to me to screw up something so easy. John came back.
“Well?”
“Well…” I said. “That’s my best price. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to lower it.”
John closed the printout and folded his hands on top of it, and looked at me the way a parent looks at a recalcitrant child. He was, in fact, old enough to be my Dad.
“Carl, look up above my head at the pillar in the corner. What do you see?”
I looked up. Attached to the pillar was one of those curved mirrors giving a wide-angle view of the hallway and, of John and I seated in his office.
“I see a mirror.”
“Yes sir, you do,” he said. “If you go down that hall a little bit and stand near the coffee pot, you can see right in here. I watched you. I do this a lot. You never looked at the printout I left open. Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I think I was sulking a bit. It would have been easy to have read the book. “I guess I felt like that would have been cheating.”
John went on to tell me, to my surprise, that I was the first person he had done this with who had not looked at the book.
Now, you may be thinking that this is where the story has a happy ending. The gruff purchasing manager, seeing the integrity of the young, inexperienced salesperson, gives him the order anyway. The lesson being that honesty gets rewarded. That is not what happened, and that is not the lesson. Texas Instruments booked my first order that day because they had a better price. Why? Because John was true to himself too; over time, I came to know that about him. John was a wonderful guy and a great teacher.
This was the start of a successful long-term relationship between John and I. Relationship leads to trust leads to business. That cycle takes patience, but when given the time to develop, it is the bedrock of real, sustained growth. John and I respected each other. That was worth far more over time than the momentary purchase order I had just lost. I had gone in thinking that the order was all that mattered and left empty-handed but full of thoughts.
No looking for “sales” became my secret to successful sales. If revenues are the thing that one measures success by, then, there is this: before my 38th birthday, I turned that understanding into over $1B in orders. Revenue, purchase orders, money, etc. are distractions that hide a simple underlying truth: the first order of business is always people, and the first order of people is a relationship.
That’s a good lesson to lose an order on.