Her idea will be featured in
ACDelco Sales Challenges, a booklet the company publishes that serves as one of its newest training tools. In addition to this pat on the back, Saulig also won a trip to Las Vegas, where she attended two NASCAR races and met top-rated driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. All this because she found a new way to reach and share information with customers.
Her problem: If a new product came out or a special sale was starting, she wanted her customers to know immediately, but it took a long time to notify each of them in person, and some would find out much later than others. Her solution was to publish her own newsletter with all the key information and send it to her customers once a month.
Using her home computer and the PowerPoint program provided by the company, she began writing and designing a two-page newsletter, "ACDelco Local News," in March I997, just two months after she started the job. The newsletter includes articles about new products and special offers available through ACDelco. She writes and designs the articles herself with graphics from PowerPoint and clip-art programs. She prints the first copy of the newsletter on her Laserjet printer and photocopies the rest at a local copy shop. When there are no new products or special offers to announce, she writes about ongoing programs she wants her customers to know about or other topics she believes they'll find interesting, such as resetting their computers for the new millennium. Sometimes she attaches product brochures to the newsletter.
She mails the newsletter to 35 customers and also makes it available to the other 9 managers in her sales zone, who send it to their own customers. She keeps extra copies with her to hand out to new customers.
She knows her newsletter is a good idea because she sees copies of it on company bulletin boards when she makes her rounds. "They appreciate it. It's been very rewarding," she says.
ACDelco executives also appreciate it and named it one of the best ideas in the Sales Challenges program.
Last year, the company hired The HR Chally Group, a Dayton, OH, firm best known for its tests for sales candidates, to help develop the Sales Challenges program. The challenges came from customers who were interviewed to find their most frequent complaints. Then members of the ACDelco sales force provided solutions to the customers' challenges. Chally performed a customer audit to compile the top 18 challenges, then, according to Chally CEO Howard Stevens, they interviewed ACDelco's top reps to find the solutions. The results were published in a hardcover booklet [a "Sales Coaching Tip Manual"] and presented to ACDelco's 450-member sales force.
Although the booklet was published last year and distributed to the sales force, few salespeople read it, according to Terry Wisner, ACDelco's manager of business management and sales training. His solution: Hold a contest to find new sales challenges and solutions. In order to submit new challenges, sales reps had to read the booklet to find out what the other challenges were. So the contest was really a way to get the reps to read the booklet, which Wisner views as an important training tool. It's part of the company's effort to build a knowledge-based organization, he says.
When Wisner invited the entire sales staff to enter the contest, I20 salespeople offered solutions to challenges. A management panel judged the submissions and selected one winner from each of the seven sales zones.
The company announced the winners at the national sales meeting in Phoenix in January and invited them to Las Vegas in February for a weekend of NASCAR racing events. The races were an ideal prize to award because they are tied in to the company. ACDelco sponsors a car driven by Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the Busch Grand National Tour. Earnhardt was in Las Vegas for the races and met the winners of the contest. He talked to them about his sharing information with his crew, which compares to the Sales Challenges program sharing information with the sales force.
ACDelco is currently updating the Sales Challenges booklet to include the new challenges submitted by Saulig and the other contest winners. The new booklet will be distributed to the sales force and also used as an orientation tool for new hires.
- KEN LIEBESKIND
Ken Liebeskind is a Senior Editor at Selling Power.
