Relationships Are Still the Most Important Part of Heavy-Duty Sales
Learn from their combined experience and expertise to navigate challenges, seize opportunities, and flourish by building strong relationships.
Episode 316: We have two heavy-duty experts ready to share the most important tips for heavy-duty people to succeed in the industry. Get ready to take notes because we’re talking about business relationships, fundamental skills needed to stay relevant, and how to adapt to ever-changing technology in the industry.
Join this heavy-duty roundtable conversation with our host Jamie Irvine, David Seewack the CEO & Founder of FinditParts, and Walt Sherbourne the VP of Canada and Group Sales at Dayton Parts.
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Transcript of Episode
Jamie Irvine:
You are listening to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine, and this is the place where we have conversations that empower heavy-duty people.
I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation. My guests today are David Seewack, the CEO and Founder of FinditParts, and Walt Sherborne, VP of Canada and Group Sales for Dayton Parts. Now David’s been on the show many times. We’re excited to have Walt here today.
Walt has 30 plus years of sales and marketing experience in heavy-duty and specifically in the heavy-duty trucking industry. So he’s a wealth of knowledge. I’m looking forward to talking to both of them. So Walt, welcome to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. So glad to have you here.
Walt Sherbourne:
I’m glad to be here. I appreciate the invite.
Jamie Irvine:
And David, welcome back to the show.
David Seewack:
Glad to be here and thanks for having me. And nice seeing you Walt.
Walt Sherbourne:
Yeah, good to see you as well David.
Jamie Irvine:
So I’d like to take a couple minutes just to give the audience an opportunity to get to know our guests. So first of all, David, can you just give us a brief overview of your career and what makes FinditParts such a different company when it comes to parts distribution?
David Seewack:
I’d be happy to. So I’ve been on the show before, so I hope I don’t repeat this too many times for the other viewers that have seen it. But I’m David Seewack and I started in the truck parts business from the time I was young and I went to work for a family company that we had one store and we grew that distribution company from one location to 24 locations and it was great business. I loved it.
I loved everyone I dealt with, built really strong relationships with people like Walt. We did business, I don’t want to admit how long, but we’ve done business forever. And then when I exited the business, after a few years, I wanted to do things differently and I always had the vision of building an online marketplace.
And that’s where we brought where I came to today, which is in Building FinditParts, which is an online marketplace strictly selling heavy-duty and automotive parts.
Jamie Irvine:
Alright, awesome. And Walt, we mentioned in the intro 30 plus years of experience, but could you give us some of the highlights of your career?
Walt Sherbourne:
Yeah, I mean it’s almost coming up on 40, which is kind of sad for me to look back that long because I’ve known David quite a while. But I started my career in 1984 at a little company called TRW as a District Salesperson.
Then went to a company called Rockwell that is now Meritor, and then they turned into Cummins and spent almost 20 years there before coming back to Dayton parts in 2014 as the VP of Marketing. And now that dormant has acquired Dayton Parts, I’ve gotten back into the sales side of the business, which I am very passionate about. So that’s been my span over the last almost 40 years.
Jamie Irvine:
So did you start right from day one in the sales and marketing side of the business? Or if not, when did you transition sales and marketing?
Walt Sherbourne:
Well, I started right out of college in 1984, was given the opportunity to have a region or territory with a company called TRW as I mentioned, and covered basically all of New England all the way down to Maryland and got to meet a lot of people.
I mean they took a country boy who lived and grew up in Pennsylvania and threw me into New York City. So that was a wide awakening for me, but I loved every bit of it.
Jamie Irvine:
That makes a lot of sense. So as someone who grew up in Eastern Canada and then at 17 left home and moved to Vancouver, I know what that culture shock feels like to be a country boy in the big city. When you are thinking back on your career, let’s talk a little bit about some of the fundamentals that you learned early on that you would say are still very applicable today.
Walt Sherbourne:
I would think back, I mean as I watched some of my, as I want to call them mentors growing up when I was growing up as a child and I had a father that was in sales and he taught me a few fundamentals, and I’m going to just give you five of ’em that are really stick with me and they’ve stuck with me through 30 years.
Really listening to whoever the customer is, listen to what they’re saying, try to gain an understanding of their pain points and see if you can develop solutions for them.
Gain all the knowledge you can on the products and services you’re selling because this way you can help guide the customer to come up with solutions and help them create sales and revenue through their channel that they’re selling through.
And the other thing that I really, really believe in, and I tell everybody that I talk to that asked me this type of question is you got to follow up.
I mean, if you don’t follow up, your customers are going to look at like, okay, he’s just around for a little bit. He’s not going to be there for the long haul. Make sure you follow up with anything that they ask you, any tasks that are given. And then the other thing is too, is build those strong relationships. Get to know the people, not just the owner like a David Seewack in the company.
Get to know the others in the company. David is not going to be there forever. I mean I had a situation where a customer that I went to the back, basically the backside of the office, they actually turned out to be the owner 10 years down the road.
So that relationship that I cultivated was very strong from the beginning once they took over. So I always say build as many relationships as you can, they’re going to help you in the future. That’s always been some of my, I want to say fundamentals of the business.
And then the one last thing that I really look at is you’re not going to win every battle, but don’t give up because rejection I know is difficult to take sometimes where you feel like you’ve done everything you can to win that opportunity, but you know what, it may not be the right opportunity for you and you just got to go on to the next one and keep working forward.
Jamie Irvine:
And timing is a big thing I’ve learned over the years that maybe the problem you solve is a big problem, but maybe it doesn’t crack the top five problems that that company is trying to solve right now.
And six months from now or a year from now, they may come back around to that and say, look, we’ve got this other stuff fixed now. I remember you talked to me about that. It’s time now. We gave that some proper attention. If you don’t do that, follow-up in between, you’ll never get a chance at that business.
Walt Sherbourne:
That’s correct. I mean, like I said, I look at every opportunity and like I said, if I don’t get it, there’s a reason for why I didn’t get that, but I got to be resilient and maybe the next opportunity that comes along I will win because I’ve laid the groundwork for that opportunity based on them seeing how hard I worked for the other opportunity we didn’t get.
Jamie Irvine:
David, when you listened to us talk about this, like you said, for many years you were in that brick and mortar space. What about it resonates with you?
David Seewack:
Well first I’d like to say that Walt and I are close specifically for the reasons that he just outlined. Walt was working at Rockwell that turned into Meritor for so many years and we built a really strong relationship and that relationship transcended into the different roles and positions and companies that he went to.
So that’s proof positive that if you do what you say you’re supposed to do and you follow up and if you deliver what you say you’re going to and you’re reliable and you’re respectful and you meet and basically when Walt and I did business, I saw him move up the ranks and move to other companies and we just developed a great relationship.
So we’ll be buddies forever, wherever he goes and we became friends again or doing business when I was at FinditParts. So I think a lot of the things that Walt hit on were just like sales 101.
I don’t care what business you’re in, what company you work for or what product you sell, it’s plan your work and work your plan. It is so important that you do meet all the various different people at the companies because people turn over when you bypass someone in a position and only talk to their boss, when their boss leaves, the guy will remember that you didn’t give him the time of day.
So I just think that, I mean, I would echo most of what Watt was saying. It’s it’s pretty basic stuff and I just think that if you follow those rules, you’ll be successful selling whatever it is, heavy-duty or any other product.
Jamie Irvine:
We might all look at that as common sense, but unfortunately common sense isn’t always common practice. So to us we’ve got that curse of knowledge where we know this and we’ve been applying those principles for decades. But for someone listening who’s maybe just starting their career, these are the fundamental building blocks that they need to know are important.
And sometimes there’s lot of pressure to get results and so sometimes there’s a tendency to feel like maybe you should violate one of those principles to get the short-term result. But Walt, what have you learned in almost 40 years in the business? Is that the right strategy?
Walt Sherbourne:
Yeah, I think it is. I mean, think the biggest thing that I can look back on my career. I mean I’m still going strong as we say, but the fundamentals work. I know technology started to take some of that, what I want to call that fundamental face-to-face meeting out of practice.
But you got to be willing to adapt to the change and just continuously see everybody. But unfortunately you’re not going to be able to see the person behind the David Seewacks of the world that would be next in line to take over the company doing it all virtual.
So that face-to-face meeting is still very important to make sure that you get in front of not only David who’s the owner of the company, but all of his people that are there that he works with to make find a part successful.
David Seewack:
Another thing I’d add to that is that it’s okay not to know something. So there’s nothing worth that When you walk in and visit a business owner and you’re new salesperson and you really get over your skis by saying more than you actually do. I actually think it works better in the reverse to say, hey, I’m a great salesman and I work for a fantastic company.
I really don’t know the answer to that, but I’ll find out the answer and get back with you. For me, that always resonated better than trying to answer something you really don’t know what you’re talking about and you lose credibility with who you’re dealing with.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, I personally think that the person who can find the answer is more valuable than someone who kind of conducts themselves as a know-it-all because we all know that it’s impossible. There’s so much to learn in this business. We’ve been in it for decades and we’re still all learning every single week.
Walt Sherbourne:
Agreed. Yes, I would agree. I mean, I would echo David’s comment about that. I mean, I had a very tough as I want to call product manager in one of my companies and literally I’d call him because I didn’t know anything when I was starting out brand new. And still today I’m learning every day.
But I mean this guy made me look it up. He said, the answer’s on page, I’m not going to give you the answer. Look it up. And that made me stronger because I went and looked it up first before I decided to tell the customer the right answer to make sure it was correct.
But I mean, this guy was very tough. I mean, yes, he’d give you an answer if you were on the fly and you had to have it right away. But to tell the customer no sometimes is very difficult. I don’t know that answer, but I think it’s the best practice too to make sure that hey, if you really don’t know, they know when you’re telling the non-truth.
I mean they’re going to find that out, but I’d rather say, look, I don’t know. I will get back to you as soon as possible, but again, the follow up behind that, it has to happen in order to make sure that the customer’s going to respect you in the long run.
Jamie Irvine:
Let’s talk a little bit about how things are changing because despite the fact that things are changing, these fundamentals that you’re bringing up, I believe will transcend any changes that we see because of technology.
That being said, there are aspects of the job of sales and marketing that are shifting and changing because of technology and because of just the conditions and the climate that we live in today. So Walt, how has sales and marketing changed since you started in the business?
Walt Sherbourne:
Well, if I look back 30 years ago, I remember sitting on the highway on the Long Island expressway with a cell phone through my car window. I mean, the first little minor change that happened, the simple change that we all live by every day now is a cell phone, that’s allowed us to be a lot more productive.
And it’s also allowed us to, as I want to say, become a doctor in a sense because you’re always on call. I mean that phone is always going to ring. You’re always going to be available for the customer. Before with the landline phones, that really didn’t happen.
But email also, that was another thing that really has come over the course of my career, being able to respond. And like you said, if you didn’t know the answer, you found out the answer later in the day. Now you could also email with a confirmation via email now and the customer has a written answer instead of communicating by phone.
That’s also changed in my career. When you look at the digital presence that’s out there, I mean, who would’ve thought that a end user or even my customers that I sell to today would be ordering through websites or using social media, email marketing to out there and communicate their brand and what their value proposition is in the market.
That’s become pretty, now every day everybody uses that. But in my career, those platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, to drive advertising and messages to our potential customers as well as our customers, has become a significant imprint in our companies today. We even use smartphones for mobile marketing. I mean, we send text messages to certain people that sign up for text messages to give them, hey, what’s the new product of the week or the month?
So those type of searchability technologies are becoming ever present. And now we’ve got another one that’s coming. AI is going to change the world the next say five to 10 years. I think it’s going to be even more significant. So I mean technology is really the forefront.
Jamie Irvine:
And when I think back to just the pre-cell phone era, when you were on the road selling, you would fax orders into the office and people often would call the office and leave messages for you.
You might only call in the morning and in the evening because the rest of the time you were on the road. And people might think that I’m describing the 1950s, but I started selling in the early 2000’s, and that’s still what it was like. I mean, yes, there was cell phones by then, but not everybody was using ’em.
They weren’t that reliable in the rural settings. And so in the first few years of my sales career, yeah, you’d phone into the office and get your messages and you’d be talking to a customer, you’d make a sale and you’d get ’em to fax that order in right then and there.
And what I noticed when we shifted to smart technology and cell phones and email, the ability to communicate dramatically increased, but then the quality of the communication also changed and it required some new skills to be able to use that technology effectively.
And I think we’re going to see that again as we transition out of Web 2.0 and into Web 3.0 technology, which includes augmented reality and artificial intelligence. So you have to be adaptable, you have to keep up with the changes, and you have to kind of meet your customers where they are at the time.
David, you have completely transformed yourself from a brick and mortar distributor with 24 stores to an online marketplace. What would you say from your perspective, are the real challenges now on the marketing side of business?
David Seewack:
Well, on the marketing, I mean it’s so much different now because everything marketing for us is digital. So we’re meeting the customer any which way and wherever they are. To what Walt was saying, obviously you want to be social marketing, you’re doing email, you’re doing text marketing.
We do a lot with AI today where we know the customer. We want to have more personalization when the customer comes to our website so we know who you are and what you’ve looked at and what you have a propensity to want to shop for.
So we’re a lot smarter as it relates to interacting with our customer, and we want our customer really understanding that we know who they are and we’re trying to serve up what they need. A lot of the things Walt was talking about as far as communicating as a salesperson, obviously look at what we’re doing right now.
We’re on a webcam. A lot of what I do now with suppliers is I’ll set up a Zoom meeting or a webinar of any sort and you can communicate and you’re able to get a lot done now much quicker and much more efficiently than you used to.
So if I have to meet someone, I’ll have two or three meetings on webcams like this, but then nothing beats a face-to-face. I mean, I think a face-to-face really changes the interactivity between business owners or manufacturers and people like myself. I think everyone should leverage technology to be more productive. So you want to ping people and text them, I’m coming.
You want to use your smartphone to take a picture of the part they’re looking at. You may have a two-way video showing them their part. When you talk about augmented reality, I think we’re going to use the glasses and we’re going to have mechanics that are going to be teaching other folks how to do jobs, or there may be training manuals that are in your goggles that you’re going to know how to do the job.
So I say harness technology and really think with an open mind about how you going to apply it to make yourself more productive. And I think if we do that, these are tools that are just so helpful that we really, it can put you a notch above the next salesperson. You’re really meeting the customer where they are, so you don’t want to over tech it, but when they’re techy, you’re on top of it.
Jamie Irvine:
And there’s this tendency that I find that people kind of think that it’s an either or, right? Well, we either do it the way we used to or we adopt all this new technology and I don’t see it that way. So I’ll give you an example. If we’re all at a trade show, and let’s say, David, I’m introducing you to someone new and you and I and Walt, we all know each other, we’ve met each other in person before, but someone new comes up.
And if we’re really comfortable with that person, they can stand within three feet of us and we don’t feel uncomfortable at all. That’s called the social zone. If you’re not comfortable with someone, you meet a stranger and they’re kind of intimidating or they look like they’re dangerous, you’re not going to let them in that three feet of you, you’re going to step back from them.
That’s just the way that we operate in the real world. One of the things that people don’t realize is our brains can’t really distinguish the difference right now as the three of us are on webcams, that we’re not in the social zone. We’re within that three feet of each other despite being thousands of miles apart. And our brains can’t tell the difference.
And I can prove that because I have spent a couple years sometimes working with clients strictly remotely, and then we finally get to meet and the first thing they do, they don’t shake my hand to give me a hug. And that shows that over time we’ve built up this trust and we’ve been inside that social zone virtually. And then to your point, when you get to meet in person, that relationship has been preloaded.
So in the past we had to do a lot of work to build the relationship to a point where you would give another guy a hug at a trade show, but we can preload the relationship building part of our sales activities and the sales channels with these tools. So I don’t see it as an either or. I see it as very powerful tools when deployed correctly can be a fantastic advantage in sales.
David Seewack:
Yeah I agree. And I think a lot of sales is body language. When you’re on a Zoom call like this, you can’t really get a total feel for someone. And when you’re in person, it really is different. But mixing the two I find to be the best of all worlds.
Jamie Irvine:
And proof of that is one time a guy walked up to me and he goes, it is the first time we’ve met, despite being on video calls for a long time. And he looked at me, he goes, you’re not five eight.
I said, did I ever tell you I was five eight? And he goes, no, but you’ve always sitting at a desk. So I just thought you were five eight. He goes, you’re over six feet tall. That’s funny. So you’re right, it’s not a complete, it’ll never be a replacement for in-person, but there’s a time and a place for everything.
Walt Sherbourne:
I just wish I was five eight.
David Seewack:
You mean you’re not even five eight?
Walt Sherbourne:
Oh no, I’m not even close.
Jamie Irvine:
Okay. So Walt, you said something a little earlier that I put in the back of my memory and I wanted to bring it back around to, so you talked about the importance of using all these tools to get your value proposition in front of your customers.
So I’d like to know, where do you think suppliers, not the distributors, but the suppliers are kind of failing right now at getting that message in front of the fleets who use their product and the distributors who sell their product?
Walt Sherbourne:
Well, I mean, I can only speak for my career, right, of who I work for.
Jamie Irvine:
We won’t name names, but tell us what you really think.
Walt Sherbourne:
Overall, if I look at the HD heavy-duty aftermarket, I think we’re behind when it comes to this digital presence and doing a lot of this stuff.
We’re catching up now as we speak, but it’s really that when that consumer end user that David goes out and tries to sell or we even try to get influenced to purchase our brand or our value that we put in our products, we haven’t done a lot of that. I mean, we haven’t been reaching to the end user through a lot of these platforms, and we’re starting to do that now.
But I think we’re behind. I mean, you look at the content marketing for example, where there’s a lot of data. We have a lot of data for our products. I mean, a lot of that data is captured in our dimensional data, especially on the heavy-duty side.
A lot of year make model stuff, especially on the products that I represent, you really don’t have the year make model for undercarriage products above the frame we do, but below the frame we don’t. So when you’re looking at that and when the consumer is looking up the product, he needs to understand what the measurements are. We have them.
But when we’re trying to get that value out of our brand and bring him into our website or bring him somewhere where he can look at the products and say, okay, they have this basket of products, this is what I’m looking for. This is the product I need, and then where can he go get it from our distribution base?
We’re slowly adapting to that type of platform right now, we just don’t have that there. I look at the automotive side because I’ve been exposed to both sides of the businesses, automotive and heavy-duty, and automotive seems to be about 10 years ahead of us with regards to this.
So now we’re trying to catch up and I think we will catch up. I mean, we’re catching up faster and faster. We realized the value behind bringing the customer to our distributors to help them sell our brand and our product.
I mean, that’s really what we’re trying to do. Picture is a very simple thing, a picture of the product. David mentioned the mechanic looking at the training through goggles, putting training stuff together on our products helps bring that value back to the consumer as well.
But even taking a picture of the product, I’d like to see down the road where you can take a picture of the product that you want, upload that into the website, and it gives him a couple choices because when you’re looking for a hanger, there could be multiple hangers, but at least you get close. So we’re adopting a lot of this, what I want to call the advances in technology to get to that platform at some time in the future. I mean, quicker than short.
Jamie Irvine:
And field work with manufacturers when you’re in the distribution game field work with manufacturers is invaluable for both the distributor and the manufacturer because puts the manufacturer in contact with the end user of their product end, helps them understand what’s going on on the ground.
For the distributor that support from their suppliers is really critical. But for a long time, that was kind of like one of the only ways that suppliers could really build any kind of relationship with those end user customers.
But the opportunity there for suppliers to do pull through marketing and to build a brand where people start saying, I want this product or part number, but I want it as a Dayton part, not someone else’s. That’s great for the distributor if they’re a supplier or if they’re a distributor of that supplier that really greases the wheel and makes the sales so much easier.
So I just think there’s a big opportunity there that we still haven’t fully taken advantage of. And I think that the suppliers do need to have those strong relationships. And obviously if there’s testing being done, they have relationship with fleets.
But there is a big part of the market that in the past it was just impossible for suppliers to reach every one of those. That’s why they had distributors. But I don’t see it as a threat to the distributor. If a supplier does a good job of that, I see it actually as something that makes the sale happen easier. We’re going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. We’ll be right back.
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David, from your perspective, Walt talked about us being a little behind. Where do you see us going with the technology and how could a distributor today and maybe a supplier challenge that status quo that we’ve had for the last few decades and really do things different?
David Seewack:
Well, I can look at it from two different aspects. One, on the brick and mortar world, it’s a push and a pull.
So some of the challenges from the manufacturer’s perspective is they may do field work, they spend a lot of time building their brand with the customer, and the customer may want that Dayton part, and then the customer takes their part into their local distributor and that distributor will sell whatever part they have on their shelf. They may or may not sell the product that Walt and his team have pushed in the marketplace.
So I mean, that’s a challenge, Walt can speak for himself, but I know that’s a challenge in the marketplace. For us, it’s different because we offer all types of brands. We have preferred brands. So if someone’s looking for a date and part number 1, 2, 3, we’ll always give ’em exactly what they ask for.
So we might show alternatives that cross-reference. So the customer always has the choice, but for us, it really works well when we work hand in glove with the suppliers that when they in fact call on customers or build brand loyalty with that end user. And if they’re buying it online, they know they can get it immediately. They may not know that their particular distributor has it.
So I just think that everything is changing. I think that I always suggest that you try to reinvent yourself every year. So I always say don’t do things like you’ve always done them. You need to keep adapting. So brick and mortar, you’ll start texting to your customers, you’ll email to them, you’ll find other ways to communicate with them. And I think you have to change with the time.
So my advice is you want to make sure that you talk to the younger folks because remember old guys like us ingest data one way and younger kids are looking at it completely different. So Walt may not be on TikTok or he may not be on the next cool app, but our customers are because younger. So I think we have to meet the customers where they are and we have to adapt to the way that they’re changing as well.
Walt Sherbourne:
I would echo those statements. I mean, we’ve got to go where the customer is. I mean, you look today, I mean the guy coming up and I mean I’m looking at some of our newer sales guys that are out there that are out in the world today, and they’re using various different methods that I did not ever use before.
I mean, they’re communicating a product, they’re doing an impromptu video and just sending it to their customers because if a guy had a problem with a part, he’s bringing it back to our product team, they’re doing a quick video and sending out the answer right away.
I would’ve never done that. I mean now I’m starting to adapt to that because I think it’s a very good solution to the problem. Number one, the customer is seeing your part. He had an issue installing it. For example, you showed him how to install that part and you’ve won on both sides.
The customer sees it visually. He sees you took really good, I don’t want to say customer experience because you heard what he said. You researched what happened, you solved the issue, and then you sent it back to the customer with a training type video of how you install the part. I never did that. I would always do it verbally because I didn’t have the resources I had before.
Now I have those resources that I could quickly do it by a cell phone, take a quick video and send things there. So adapting to the technology I think is one of the best things we can do as the older guys on the call here because we’ve got to be where the customers are.
We got to create that personalization between me and the customer because I’m like him. If I was on the other side, I would like to see how it’s done because I’m a visual person. If I see it being installed, I can pretty much do it. Reading a manual sometimes gets a little difficult.
David Seewack:
I can actually speak to Walt’s company. Dorman has done a terrific job of modernizing their business. They have really a great website. They have instructional videos.
So I think as manufacturers evolve, I think Dorman is a great example of a company that is modern that delivers content in the way that people can ingest it any which way they need to. So I think that’s a really good example of a company that’s staying ahead of the times or at the bleeding edge of the times.
Walt Sherbourne:
And we’re looking to, and that’s one of the things Jamie, and we’re looking to take the dormant mythology that they’ve done on the light duty side and transform that on the heavy-duty side. So we’re already starting with all the attributes and content data and all that stuff for the heavy duty parts that we have before and getting the pictures.
And I mean I spent a lot of time during our, as I want to call it, our two year break in a sense with the illness that went around the country of taking pictures and getting our stuff up to date so that we can continue to give as much content and show visually the part that the looking for.
Jamie Irvine:
And as we continue to adapt, it’s really, I think we’re going to see some big shifts and I think we’re going to see shifts in brand loyalty. I think we’re going to see shifts in the way that we interact with our customers.
And I think in the long run, this next generation coming up, the millennials are different because they kind of grew up in the old world and then they matured and became adults in the new world. But this next generation, like my daughter’s age, she’s 20. These kids, they’re really, really smart and they’re really good at using technology and I’m really excited to see what this next generation brings to the industry.
Their way of looking at things will be different. They’ll embrace technology in ways we can’t even imagine. And that’s all going to be really interesting to see unfold. Let’s shift in our conversation a little bit and talk about that younger generation if they want to have a long career in this industry.
David, what advice would you have for someone who wants that long career specifically in selling heavy-duty parts? Because it’s going to be a completely different environment moving forward than it was when you and I were coming up through the ranks.
David Seewack:
It’s funny, a long career is kind of old school. I mean, that sounds crazy in and of itself because it used to be like once you get a job with IBM, you’re at IBM for life and I’m now learning. When you look at a resume, you see people bouncing around. They’ll spend two years here, three years there. I think this is a great business for a multitude of reasons. One, the customers that we do business with are cool. I mean, they’re just like regular folks.
So if you treat them with respect, it’s just old school. You do a good job, you take care of the customers, you treat ’em well and they’ll reciprocate. So I think with salespeople, it’s a really good training ground. To Walt’s point, you have to be able to accept no. And for me, I always say no is just an opportunity for you to say yes.
And I just never give up. I mean, my friends call me a honey badger, I just never give up. I never quit and I keep calling on that person. So it teaches you great skills that you can use anywhere that you go. So I think that this is a great training ground for anyone that’s selling anything.
And I just think that we’re in a great industry, but selling is different and selling will become different. Some people may not want to see salespeople as frequently, so you have to be more creative as a salesperson as we’re talking about all these other means by which to communicate.
So I think this is a great business. I love the people in our business, the owners, the counter guys, the customers, the salespeople all the way around. I think it’s a great industry. It’s not as political other than dealing with the really big fleets pretty much when you’re on the ground, they’re just really great folks. And I love everyone I interact with. I find that they’re superhuman, they’re really cool.
They’re very understanding of young people. And as long as you do what you say you’re going to do, I mean if you’re flaky, they’re not going to take to you. So it doesn’t matter if you’re a guy or a gal, I find that our customers are receptive if you do a good job and if you follow up. So I think if you work hard and you work for a good company, you’ll be successful.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, I had someone talk to me about that, about how male dominated our industry was. And I started thinking about all the way back to 1998, every heavy-duty parts company I’ve been involved in both manufacturing and distribution.
And I started listing off all the women who worked at those companies and the person stopped and said, maybe it’s not as male dominated as I think. And I said, no. I said, we have always been very accepting. I mean, obviously times have changed and we have gotten better over time with that. But yeah, some of the top tier people in our industry are women.
And it is really interesting to see how the trucking industry is the backbone of society. Like you said, David, it’s a salt of the earth kind of people. And if you just are real with them and you work hard and you try to help them, it is amazing how quickly they will embrace new people to the industry.
And as a Canadian kid coming down to the states and doing what I do now, it’s amazing the way that people have just opened up their arms and said, Hey, if you’re here trying to help us, then we want you here. So I don’t think anybody should hold back from trying to join the industry just because maybe they don’t come from a background that they think is the traditional background.
Walt, from your perspective, what specific skills could a young person, let’s say they’re in their early twenties, what kinds of skills could they work on that would help them transcend things like technological change but just make them successful?
Walt Sherbourne:
I think you’re going to see basically the basics that we talked about earlier. They’ve got to have the sales skills. I mean, they’ve got to be able to prospect. They’ve got to go out and negotiate because you’re always going to have that negotiation between you and the customer handle objectives.
And the one thing that I definitely see that doesn’t happen all the time is ask for the order or ask for the sale. You’ll give your great speech and you’ll make that great presentation. And I’ve had this happen with training some folks in my career and they don’t ask for the order.
And it’s like you get out there and you critique ’em. I say, what is the one thing you didn’t do? And oh, I didn’t ask for the order. So it’s kind of those types of things, just the basic sales skills, but be responsive to the customer, provide the information he’s looking for.
If you don’t know the answer, as we’ve talked about, make sure you get in the answer, get back to ’em in a timely manner. But when I look at the organization of the younger generation today, their technology that they’re using today was Salesforce and a few other things little hard for me to learn in the beginning, but now that I know it and I’m understanding it, it’s making my job a lot easier to track leads and staying organized. Where I didn’t have that before. It was all by hand in paper.
But now with technology able to be adaptive, that to me, I look at change as an opportunity for me to learn something new. I’m sitting here watching data that’s coming in and giving me predictability more than I had before where I can actually go to a customer and say, hey, you’ve bought this product before.
You haven’t bought it three months, what’s going on? And then what happens in that conversation when you’re presenting that to the customer? It’s either he’s moved the business, he didn’t realize it, or he is lost the customer that he didn’t realize.
So I’ve had that ability to go in and say, hey, there’s certain parts that you’re not buying anymore, why? And being able to use that analytics as I want to call it, or the data analytics that we’re using today and having that at your fingertips has been a great thing for me that we’re using it today.
Continue to be resilient. I mean there’s, as David said, take the answer no as an opportunity to get motivated to get back in there for some other opportunity that comes along.
David Seewack:
Another thing Walt just said that reminds me of a story like the military. When you’re in the military, which I wasn’t, but you got to make your bed, right? You got to make your bed perfectly. And the philosophy behind that is if you make your bed perfectly, you’ve already succeeded in that day. You started the day with the success.
I remember I worked with an old school sales guy and he said that if I don’t get an order from every customer, I failed. Because there’s probably not a call that you make on a customer that they don’t need something that you could sell them. And I think the idea of really a trying to make it so that you ask for the sale and try to leave with an order that makes all the difference in the world and it makes you feel more successful in the day.
So I think that’s another thing that no one should discount that if you’re a salesperson, you have to ask for the order and you can teach any salesperson our business, but if you know our business, it’s hard to teach them to be a salesperson. So if you don’t have that makeup, it’s a struggle.
Walt Sherbourne:
And David, I mean, I’ll just echo that statement a little bit, Jamie. When I interview a lot of folks for sales positions, I ask them, of course, the product questions, what products do? What have you sold before?
But it’s really, I’m trying to get an understanding of their sales skills first. I can teach the product side. It’s the sales skills that really you got to have that in you for whatever it is. You got to have that being able to be easy and talk easily with somebody you don’t even know.
And there’s a lot of folks out there that are sales guys that have been taught the product now because they didn’t have any product knowledge before. I mean, I’m one of them. I had that sales in me. I didn’t know a leaf spring when I came out of college, but I know enough about leaf springs to be dangerous in my 30 years now.
Jamie Irvine:
So you guys have my brain going in 18 different directions. So many things I want to talk about. I want to focus in, well first of all, how do you know if you’ve got what it takes to be in sales? There actually is tools out there. So in my consulting business, we work with a psychometric assessment tool called TRAITS.
It’s not one like Myers-Briggs or Disc where it just puts people into buckets. It’s a tool that actually allows someone like me, if I was evaluating a young person to really understand their personality composition and the behaviors that they as an individual would be most likely to exhibit.
And to your point, if you’ve got high assertiveness, if you’ve got good appropriate levels of sociability, if you have that high pace kind of personality, and if you’re a little less detail oriented and you’re more assertive, you’re going to be more likely to ask for the order and go for a result than you are to be like a technical salesperson where you’re highly detail oriented, which of course there’s a place for that as well.
So taking one of those tests, and if anybody listening right now wants to and they want to be in sales and they want to be in heavy-duty and you’ve never taken one of them, just reach out to us. I will set you up with it. It will cost you nothing, and we will give you the feedback you need for your career because we’re really committed to helping heavy-duty people flourish.
But Walt, you talked about negotiation skills and I wanted to go a little deeper on that. So there’s a game theory that was developed in the 1920s with a mathematician and a economist, a German economist, and they came up with this game theory and they basically broke down negotiations into three categories.
So there’s win-win, zero sum, that’s one winner, one loser and no win where everybody loses. And probably if you’ve been in sales long enough, you’ve run into somebody who’s actually pretty committed to no win and you don’t want to do business with them.
Obviously you’re pushing for win-win, but there are people out there that will challenge you and right at the last moment will ask for concessions. What advice would you have for a young person if they want to develop their negotiation skills to move somebody maybe with a zero sum mentality to a win-win? How do you learn those skills kind of hard to just take a course on that. So how would you learn those skills over time?
Walt Sherbourne:
Yeah, I mean, I’ve had a lot of young sales guys in my career that have come to me with those type of situations where they’re negotiating deals and they bring the deal to me. And my thought process behind it is you can never make a bad deal because if you do make a bad deal that’s not favorable to the company or favorable as a win-win for everybody, we can talk about it, how we would do it differently. You’ve got to do it by trial and error.
It’s very difficult to not do it by trial and error. You’re going to lose some, you’re going to be on the bad end of some deals, but you’re also going to be on the good deals from a customer’s perspective. And the way I try to treat the customers is I have to make money. They have to make money, so let’s try to compromise somewhere in the middle.
So we’re both going to survive and we’re both going to win the battle because they’ve got to ultimately sell that product to the end user that I’d like them to sell my product. So I think from a negotiation standpoint, it is a lot by trial and error and experience of just going out there and having those conversations.
And like I said, you’re going to win some, you’re going to lose some, but ultimately you want to get to that where both parties are able to make a living per se so that they can go sell that product. And I can still create revenue for my company because ultimately I have to stay in business for my customer to sell my products.
Jamie Irvine:
David, what’s your thoughts on that?
David Seewack:
So for me, I’ve been both, I’ve been a salesman, I’ve negotiated with suppliers, a couple lessons that I’ve learned as it relates to negotiating with suppliers. I think I was, and it doesn’t matter who you’re dealing with, I never want to get the last penny out of a deal.
I never want the person that I’m negotiating with to feel like, man, that was such a tough deal and I hate dealing with that person is terrible. I might get a deal with Walt and I’m like, Walt, you got to do this deal. You got to give to me his price, or else I always want to do it with a velvet glove.
I’m like, come on Walt, I need to buy a little bit better. How do we make this great for both of us? I’ll give you more volume. I need a better price. And everyone’s got to give. And if you give and they give everyone’s happy, and then that really lays the foundation for future negotiations because if you negotiate a deal, you follow through with what you said you’re going to do, then it makes it easier to negotiating again.
And as it relates to being like a salesman in the field, I sell on a personal level and I just say to the customer, I’m like, if you grind me on price every single time, all you’re buying from me is price.
And people you say you can sell on price, you can sell on quality, you can sell on service. Pick two, you can’t get ’em all because everyone’s got a cost of doing business. So if you deal fairly, I think everyone basically wants a fair price.
And if you treat him fairly and you treat him well, there’s a balance. But if every customer, if he’s grinding on every deal, really not the kind of customer that I want because it just beats you up and it just like, I’m not valuable to you unless I give you the very best price and it doesn’t seem like a good relationship.
Jamie Irvine:
You know what my strategy has always been with those types of customers that grind you every time, send them to my competition. Let my competition deal with that guy. I’ll go find somebody who wants to actually have a win-win.
Walt, you talked about the role that you’ve played as a mentor over the years, and I think if I was mentoring a young salesperson and we were talking about negotiation skills, there’s a couple of things that I would talk about pushing for that win-win of course, but also knowing when to walk away.
And I also think it’s very important to have little catchphrases that you memorize, that you know when to use them at the right time. One of my favorites in negotiations is right at the outset saying, look, before we even start negotiating, I want to get something clear. I am going to sell it to you for less than I want to charge. And you’re going to pay more than you want to pay.
I like that. And then they laugh, and then you both have a good chuckle and then it puts you on a nice level playing field where, okay, this guy’s here for a win-win, right? So that mentorship component I think is really, really important.
We’re just coming to the end of our time together. Gentlemen, it’s been wonderful talking to both of you. Walt, if you want listeners to remember one thing from this conversation, what’s that one thing?
Walt Sherbourne:
Well, I think if I’m sitting there thinking back on my career and then the conversation that we’ve had, I think the one thing I would sit back and look at, hey, change is here. It’s coming. It’s going to come at a faster pace in the next five to 10 years. Be willing to adapt to that change.
Don’t get set in your ways so that you continue to try to fit the new technology into your old ways. Learn about the new technology and how it can help you even improve your position in your sale for the future.
Jamie Irvine:
You’ve been listening to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine, and today we have been speaking with Walt Sherbourne, the VP of Canada and Group Sales at Dayton Parts. To learn more about Dayton Parts, visit daytonparts.com. Walt thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it.
Walt Sherbourne:
Thank you.
Jamie Irvine:
And we’ve also been talking to David Seewack, the CEO and Founder of FinditParts. To buy your Dayton Parts through the FinditParts marketplace, go to finditparts.com today. David, thank you so much for your ongoing support of The Heavy Duty Parts Report and for being on today’s episode.
David Seewack:
Right back at you and Walt, it was great being on the call with you, and I look forward to seeing you soon. And Jamie, keep up the good work. I love your broadcasts and you’re the mentor in the market to be honest with you, because people learn. You built a whole new way of communicating with people, and I tip my hat to you. You really have blazed the trail here and I commend you for what you’re doing.
Jamie Irvine:
Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. And thank you listeners for tuning in. We’ll talk to you next week.
