THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 3, 1996 TAG: 9610030361
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: SALES JOBS IN HAMPTON ROADS
Sales is among the fastest-growing professions in Hampton Roads and
the state. This final installment in The Virginian-Pilot's series on
salespeople shows that to any salesperson, the only thing that really
matters is ``the close.''
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 117 lines
Don Helms calls the salesmen's room at Campbell Contracting Inc. the ``debriefing room.'' Especially after failing to make the sale.
The debriefing room is where a window unit air conditioner churns on high all day without getting the room any cooler. Where two fake-wood tables shoved together serve as the conference table, but hardly anybody ever seems to be sitting there.
It's where the company's salesmen, three named Don, and their sales manager, also named Don, smoke cigarettes. It's where General Manager Khader Mughrabi sometimes leads the debriefing with one simple question:
``Why didn't you close?''
That's what counts here - the close. The sale. In home improvement sales, they don't disguise the act of selling as ``consultative purchasing'' or ``consumer marketing.''
This is one of the remaining vestiges of heavy-metal selling. Get the lead. Drive to the house. Lift 300 pounds of demonstration windows out of the trunk. Knock on the door. Try to get inside. Make the pitch. Ask for money.
``Without sales, nothing happens,'' says John Campbell, the 33-year-old Virginia Tech graduate who started the Hampton company 11 years ago.
Campbell believes in pushing the sale from the time the telemarketers dig up a lead until the customer looks out and sees a freshly sided house. The formula seems to work. His company sells several million dollars worth of siding and replacement windows each year.
Helms is among the sales squad that makes it happen. The 32-year-old is a big guy whom the office secretaries call ``pretty boy,'' possibly for his bold ties and gold bracelet. He grew up in sales. His father left their California home for six-week stretches selling Schick products. Later, the family ran a hair products franchise.
When Helms' Army Reserve unit was called up for Operation Desert Storm, he knew he'd fall back on selling when he got out. He got a job at one of Campbell's competitors, settled in Hampton Roads with his fiancee and child, and took the job at Campbell Contracting in March.
He likes selling home improvement. He knows its reputation - bad. But that's just one of the obstacles a salesman has to overcome. He knows the odds. He'll get 300-plus appointments this year, and close the deal on one of three presentations.
He gets 10 percent of each sale. The telemarketer who nailed down the lead gets 1 percent. He treats all leads the same, because leads are golden. They turn into sales. Deep down, Helms knows there are good leads, bad leads, leads where the person isn't home when he shows up. He can't think that way.
``Want to know what a lead is?'' Helms asks. ``A lead is two warm bodies standing in front of you.''
He knows the potential: Some months, he'll sell work worth more than $50,000 - and keep 10 percent - but out of that he's got to pay his own gasoline (three tanks a week), cell phone bill ($300 in July) and health insurance.
Some months, he's pulled in as little as $20,000 in sales.
He knows the consequences: a return to the debriefing room to face The Question from Mughrabi or sales manager Don Divis. Why didn't you close?
In this case, Helms explains that an 82-year-old woman in a Norfolk neighborhood wanted to get other estimates. And that she kept adding requests to the job after Helms had Campbell's estimate written up. And that after he added her requests, she turned around and suggested the price might be too high.
``Did you try to give her piecemeal?'' Mughrabi asks.
Helms doesn't bother with the details. He doesn't tell Mughrabi that he shows up at the widow's house and she starts talking about how she and her husband bought it on the last day of 1949 and that she lives on a street that goes by the same name as the French town near where her brother fought in World War II. And about her varicose veins.
Helms doesn't mention that he stands out in her yard on a 95-degree day listening patiently for 2 1/2 hours. Trying to write up an order for what she wants as she tosses in stories about the time she tried to get the house painted but the painter was a boozer, or the other painter who promised two coats and only did one, or the termite people who ripped her off.
He doesn't tell Mughrabi that the woman, who's been ripped off three times, doesn't seem impressed when Helms tells her Campbell Contracting hasn't had a complaint at the Better Business Bureau in 10 years.
Or that the woman tells him, ``I'll compare it to the other people and let you know. It's only fair.''
And Helms doesn't tell Mughrabi that even after that, with his face red from the heat and whatever he puts on his dark, curly hair starting to melt, with the sun reducing his eyes to slits because he's keeping his shades off to look her in the eye, he goes for the sale again. And again.
He asks for the money seven to 10 different ways, like he's been taught. Basically, the whole lead was a disaster from the get-go, but he worked it like any other.
He even tried to use a ``balcony,'' a technique Campbell Contracting teaches its salesmen. If a customer throws in an objection, the salesman uses the ``balcony'' to buy time to try to think of some way to overcome it. Helms did that by excusing himself to call Mughrabi on his cellular phone and bounce ideas off him.
Helms has to laugh at those who teach selling.
``You got all these people that go to college to become wonderful sales managers,'' he says, ``it doesn't work that way.''
Helms doesn't tell Mughrabi all this because that's what he's supposed to do. Work leads. Pitch the product. Go for the close. Make the sale.
That's what counts here, the sale.
Or else it's back to Hampton and the debriefing room. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
LAWRENCE JACKSON/The Virginian-Pilot
Don Helms follows up leads from telemarketing calls, visiting homes
to sell homeowners on improvement possibilities, such as enclosing
Nancy Hackett's porch.
Photo
LAWRENCE JACKSON/The Virginian-Pilot
Sales leads don't always pan out. Don Helms, a home improvement
specialist, makes a call back to his office to check on an
appointment. He suspects, though, that he's been stood up. by CNB