Welcome to the Sales Operation Management course at WVU. Teelin Henderson, Teelin, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and the company that you work for? I work for the Mazak Corporation located in Florence Kentucky. They make machine tools. They're one of the world's largest manufacturers of machine tools. I've been with them for about six months now, but I've been in manufacturing for about 12 years. Okay. What's your position with the company? I'm an Account Manager. Okay, great. So, first, tell me a little bit about how you first got started in sales. I wanted to make second-generation machine tool salesman. I like talking to people, I like meeting new people, and an opportunity arose for me to use some of my personal skills and learn as I went, in terms of engineering, in terms of product. So, I took it about 12 years ago, and I've worked for four companies since then but always in manufacturing sales. So, is this something that you knew you wanted to do as a boy? I wouldn't say that, but I knew I had a good personality for it. Okay. So, tell us a little bit about some of your previous jobs like, how did you work your way up through the ranks? Well, my first job was working for my father. It was a small business just him and I. Mainly, again, sales where we'd contract out service to other similar parties that would maintain the machines that we sold, and then an opportunity came up to represent a specific line of machine tools in Southern Ohio, since I was living there at the time, seemed like a good fit. At the time, my father became more involved in this consulting business, so it was a natural dissolution of that partnership. Then, about five years ago, the sister company that I was working for me offered me a position in their automation department, and I think that was very strong future moves, so I was very happy to take that. At that point, my sales territory was Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Western Pennsylvania, Michigan and then I was proactive to those areas and then reactive to a handful of other states, and it became a lot of travel, so I took this position with Mazak and I've been really happy. So, what about sales do you enjoy? What do you find rewarding about working in sales? I've been lucky enough to represent lines that have always been able to solve somebody's problem. Every sale manufacturing that I've made has either made profit for the company, or decreased stress, or eliminated risk and frankly, I just like getting to know people, understanding the problems and then see what I can do to help. Can you just give us a little bit of a better idea of what it is you actually sell. You said machine tools, can you explain a little bit what that involves? Absolutely. Well, when people ask me, "What's machine tool?" My first question is, do you know what a lathe is? When they say, no, I impasse, but basically, my machines cut metal. They're metal shaping and metal forming machines for all sorts of industries that make parts for the medical industry, automotive, aerospace is a big one these days. Anytime metal is cut, that's the type of machine I sell. So, is this a highly competitive field? Do you have a lot of competition? Or, what are your big challenges that you face, I guess I should ask? Well, yes. It's highly competitive. There's a very large market for this and there's a lot of well-established players, and with that comes a lot of customers with brand loyalty and even when I have a solution that I believe is superior and I believe I've shown is superior, for some important reasons, often a customer will not be receptive to the message because of their brand loyalty or in the success of other lines. So, if someone was interested in sales, like, what advice would you have for them? Well, my first advice we take a look at yourself and see if it's going to be really fit for you. Do you like people? Are you comfortable talking to strangers? If you don't have a product, do you truly believe in? Do you have any need to sell that? Or, can you get yourself to the point that you believe in that product? It can also be lonely. If you're the kind of person that needs a lot of rigidity and structure within your day, I'm not positive sales is going to be the best fit. But if you can live with that, it really is great. It gives you a lot of freedom, it gives you a lot of opportunity to meet people and to talk, and it's really just a great field. So, in your company, when you're looking to recruit salespeople, what are some of the traits that you prioritize? Organization is definitely the first one. Again, our salespeople have a great deal of anonymity throughout their day. They're expected to manage their own schedule, we don't do any hand-holding, we just would like to see results for the most part. So, someone we have confidence of being self-reliant and self-organized. Again, personable. Somebody that's likable. The most important aspect of the job I think is meeting new people and getting them to give you some of their time that they could otherwise be using elsewhere. So, personable people, friendly people, and then, of course, knowledgeable. The more knowledge you have the better when it comes to your specific field, but a lot of that, we're happy to train if it's the right person. All right. So, that leads me to my next question. You're very personable, very charismatic, you like talking to people, but not everybody is as natural in this area as you are. For people who maybe don't fit into this, Mr. social, as well as you do but are still interested in sales, how much of that do you think you can learn on the job? I think you can learn a great deal on the job. It's going to take a lot of facing the fears. My line is often, do you know the difference between real confidence and fake confidence? Nobody else does either. So, you go out there and you fake it until you make it basically, and with enough facing of those fears and enough failures, eventually you're going to overcome them. So, if it's not a natural fit but you still feel like it's something you're interested in doing, it's going to be a bit of a challenge but it's certainly can be overcome. So, you said that one of the first things that you think is most important in a salesperson is being a people person. Yes. But, why don't you tell us a little bit about someone you've seen who's been able to make growth in that area, who maybe didn't start out great? Absolutely. There was a guy I worked with who just was shy. Rejection is a very big part of the job. You figure, if you'll have a 100 voicemails and you get five back, that's pretty good these days, because people are busy, and I worked with a guy who had a real hard time with that. That daily rejection and those cold calls just really wore on him, but he was really tenacious. Just over a long enough period of time, he'd make his 20, 40 however many made phone calls and eventually people would eventually call him back, they'd eventually let him in the door, and before you knew it, he had enough regular customers, enough successes. The one he would attack, he'd be able to attack a new account with little bit of confidence, and two, he built up enough of a pipeline and enough relationships, then he had a pretty nice business. So, how do you identify the people who maybe don't start out as strong but you think have potential? Is there any way you can tell the difference? Yes, it's tricky. I think, really, you don't have to be overly social to be likable. What I look for generally is, I look for someone that I like in some regard. Someone willing to at least put themselves out there a little bit, someone who's going to approach me, and that's not easy, but if you can accomplish that, generally, I see potential in that. I see opportunity. The other thing is, if someone has reached out to me via email, that's a good way to get over that fear. Your email has to be spectacular. To really make an impact these days, you need to have very clear grammar and probably a pretty impressive vocabulary, but that is another way to be effective without being overly social. So, I want to change a little bit and talk about just life at your company. What is sort of like an average day look like for you? For me, I generally start my morning with emails, that's when I get to drink my coffee, and see what I have set out for my day. The night before, I will set a task list for the most part to make sure I accomplish X, Y, and Z because, again, I have so much autonomy that if I don't set boundaries and rules for myself, then I end up doing nothing, which is always a shame. That happens rarely. Then, I'll make some phone calls. Hopefully most likely I have a couple of appointments setup throughout the day and on my way to those different appointments, I'll make a handful phone calls and try to set up new appointments throughout the week, new appointments for the following week, and check in on existing customers. So, talking about how much autonomy is involved in your work, how does your company help you stay motivated? Well, I would say that my compensation financially is probably maybe a third salary than two-thirds commission. Ideally, my commissions when they're a little bit better, they will would be a smaller percentage because my commissions would be larger. But, I have a great support staff. They give me a CRM that was already ready to go on day one, so I had a list of customers that I can start contacting immediately. They're quick to respond to any needs I have, and I find that that level of support keeps me motivated. I know I'm the tip of the spear as it were for a lot of projects and having people that are quick to respond to me, breeds loyalty and makes me want to do better for them. I know just from talking to you that your position isn't all just sales, you also do some customer service type of things. How does that factor into, you've already made the sale, but you still need to help these people I'm sure that's hard to balance existing customers versus trying to find new ones, move onto the next thing, how do you manage that? Well, I think for long-term sales program would look what I've always been a part of, you need to accept the customer is your customer first. I like to think of my customers as dealing Henderson's customers first then who are buying Mazak. I think Mazak is comfortable with that concept as well. Once you've accepted that, you want make sure that basically from cradle to grave that machine is taken care of and that customer calls you first when they have a problem. The way I prefer it is, if there's a service problem during the installation of the warranty of the machine, the customer contacts me and I contact my regional office, instead of them contacting the regional office immediately just because building that relationship is what means they're going to call me when they need another machine. Okay. Let's talk a little bit now about territory management. First, just tells us how big the area that your company sells two overall and how that's broken up into territories. Well, Mazak is a worldwide organization, and I can't speak exactly to how they sell internationally. But largely, in the US, there's about six different territories that are managed by regional managers and then within those there are managers underneath and then there are account managers below them. Do you know what criteria is used to divide the market into territories? Largely, it's based on the number of what we feel are active accounts, what we feel are viable accounts. So, no salesman is overwhelmed and no one is under performing. So, how often do you make adjustments to the territory balance to keep that load distributed evenly? It's been my experience that the territories are adjusted largely when there's some kind of changed the precipitates, a retirement or some other change of that nature. That's when we take a step back, we take a look at what makes sense for different territories and do salesman need to be readjusted here and there. You're talking about an internal retirement. Yes. Exactly right. Or a change in position, promotions, any reason that a salesman would leave his territory, generally leads to a reassessment where we take a step back and take a look about what makes sense if he's buying and what the best use of every salesman's time would be. So, it's generally internal changes rather than external changes. Yes. So, tell me, what is your territory? My territory is about 12 different counties in Ohio. The primary counties being Warren and Montgomery, which encapsulate statin and then it's about one to two terror counties thick from Dayton to about the West Virginia border. Within your territory, do you find that there's a lot of changes happening in terms of the number of people you can sell to, does it rise and fall periodically or? It does rise and fall. For the most part, my territory based on usage rates suggests that my time would be best spent in Montgomery and Warren county, where I'd say probably 98 percent if not higher of the machine tools are consumed in my given territory. So, for the most part, I am extremely proactive in those two counties and proactive to less you agree across the rest of the state, but the best use of my time is being as active as I can in Dayton. We talked a little bit in our lesson about how using sales territories can help with enthusiasm and motivation in the sales teams. Has that been true in your experience? Very much so. I don't think there's anything more exciting than getting a list of new accounts. It's an opportunity to go meet new people, it's an opportunity to find new projects, it's really invigorating. If it's the territory that's been worked by another salesman, so much the better. They're already familiar with your brand, they're already familiar with your company, what you can bring to the table for the most part for intangibles, but that's generally getting a new territory can lead a very, very productive six months where no lethargy is kicked in yet. What are the good and bad things that a manager can do in terms of territory, or does it just not change that much? No, does change to some degree. I think a good territory manager first-off helps put out fires. What's urgent to the salesman should be urgent to the territory manager, and that isn't always going to be making the sale sometimes that's getting the customer the service they need, sometimes that's getting you the literature you need. I think a good territory manager is first off reactive to their salesman. Secondly, I enjoy a great deal of autonomy. I'm not always interested in taking my territory manager with me every single day, they're great asset and I truly appreciate the help they give me on a regular basis, but I do like the freedom to go out there and build my own sales because as many salesman will tell you, they want to eat what they kill. So, that means going out and hunting alone. So, you've been a salesman for 12 years, in this time, have you seen anything that's gone, it's been really noteworthy in terms of having gone very well or very poorly in terms of territory management? In a previous position, I had a territory that was exceptionally large and unwieldy and left largely to my own devices, and I had a lot of successes in that position but I felt like I could be doing more, I felt like I should be doing more, and it just was exceptionally challenging. It just was too big a territory to really wrap my arms around and make the impact I wanted to make. This was, I don't know if it was proper management or improper management that was the shortcoming of that, but that never sat well with me. When you say too large, do you mean in terms of actual like space on a map or in number of accounts? Well, 61 way or the other but, yeah, just way too large in terms of for one salesman to cover and to truly make an impact. One of the things we prefer nowadays is for our territory managers to live within their territory. So, they can be kind of an impact in their community, they can be seen in different events, they can meet people, brand name is probably too strong. But to be involved in your community, I think it's pretty important for any account manager.
