Adopting a More Progressive Sales Approach

Moving from a Farmer to a Hunter Mentality Takes Effort

“When we recently had excess capacity to fill, we knew we needed to expand our customer base,” says Shane Soule, President of ProTec Panel & Truss. “The problem was that we weren’t immediately certain how to go about doing that.”

The problem was that Shane had a sales team that was primarily made up of “farmers,” individuals who were very good at tending to the needs of current customers and keeping them happy. What he needed though was a bunch of “hunters” to go out and aggressively chase down leads and bring in new projects and customers (learn more about hunters and farmers in the May/June 2024 SBCA Magazine issue). Typically, the people in these two camps have very different personalities and motivations.

“I knew that what we needed to do was just make phone calls,” continues Shane. “We needed to reach out to every potential customer we could contact and make them aware of our business and our products.” Shane knew he needed to make it as easy as possible for his sales team to try to overcome their aversion to making cold calls.

The first thing he did was subscribe to a service that would collect all the pertinent customer information every time a permit was pulled in the markets they served. “Calling someone after sourcing a permit for an address which provided specific details that each salesperson could then use allowed them to give an initial purpose to each call they made,” explains Shane. “It was so much better than asking them to call up someone and try to pitch our whole company or try to talk in very general terms about our products.”

The next thing Shane did was ask his sales team to block off one hour on their calendars every Friday to make calls. “If it isn’t scheduled, it is very easy to always put it off until you’re done with the next thing, which always leads into another thing and another thing,” says Shane. He also worked with the team and their leadership to set realistic but aggressive goals on how many calls they would make each week. Out of those calls, they set a goal for how many calls would turn into bids, and how many of the bids would result in new customers.

“When we first started out at zero new customers, the goals we established for ourselves looked a little daunting, but with that dedicated hour each week, we actually found it wasn’t that difficult to reach our goals,” says Shane.

The final piece was giving his sales team the tools they needed to accomplish their weekly and monthly goals. “We invested in a subscription to a customer relationship management (CRM) software, Hubspot,” shares Shane. “We use only a part of its full functionality, but it allows us to integrate both the permit data and our Outlook calendars to make it very easy to find the right information for each call.”

They were also able to integrate the cell phones of each sales team member, and record transcripts of each sales call into a centralized database. “Whenever one person went to make a call, they could easily look up who else had called that customer in the past and what they had talked about,” says Shane. “It really improved the level of communication throughout the team and allowed management to better understand the progress we were making toward a given goal.”

Shane’s sales team made up of “farmers” didn’t suddenly become “hunters” by changing their personalities or preferences, but with the right tools and a well-defined set of goals, they were able to have great success bringing in new customers to better fill their production capacity.