THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 30, 1996 TAG: 9609300042
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: SALES JOBS IN HAMPTON ROADS
Sales jobs are among the fastest-growing professions in Hampton Roads
and Virginia. This is one installment of a series profiling
salespeople. Today we look at what it's like to sell industrial
products for one of the world's largest companies.
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 141 lines
A year and a half ago Alan Peterson sold a regional hospital $125,000 worth of fluorescent lighting ballasts.
Peterson, an industrial salesman for GE Supply, convinced the hospital that its investment in energy-efficient lights would pay for itself in 13 months.
The ballasts started blowing out on Day One. About 250 of them - 10 percent - failed.
That's why Peterson knows that on this follow-up at the hospital, he's ``going to get beat up pretty bad.'' No matter that it wasn't his fault. No matter that the ballasts weren't made by his company.
His sale. His problem.
Peterson sits across a desk from the hospital's maintenance supervisor and confesses he still doesn't know what's causing the problem. The supervisor frowns.
Peterson tells him that a vice president of the manufacturer is flying in to troubleshoot. The supervisor is still frowning.
``We're gonna bolt the door and nobody's leaving 'til it gets resolved,'' Peterson says.
``I tell you one thing,'' the supervisor says, ``I appreciate you staying on top of it, and I do not appreciate everybody else disappearing after the sale.''
It wasn't easy, but Peterson had to take his licks. Comes with the territory in industrial sales.
Everybody's got similar products. Everybody's got similar prices. So one of the things Peterson sells is a vow to be there when things blow up. If something goes haywire at Newport News Shipbuilding, or the Ford assembly plant in Norfolk, he wants to be the guy they call in the middle of the night.
Peterson got an early lesson in this nearly 15 years ago. Newport News Shipbuilding called when it was docking the carrier Chester Nimitz. When they threw a switch to flood the dock, a 1940s-era Westinghouse circuit breaker blew.
Peterson, a Westinghouse guy at the time, called salvage people all over the country and found the parts.
``I had people from the shipyard running to airports from Norfolk to Richmond to pick up boxes of parts,'' Peterson says.
The Nimitz docked the next day.
Peterson, 40, has light brown eyes, blond hair that's thinning a little. He wears comfortable dress shoes because he's constantly on the move. Despite occasional trouble with asthma, he fizzes with energy.
Peterson is philosophical about the daily glitches and victories of the sales game. Things break. Equipment malfunctions. Some bids win the contract. Some don't.
Right out of James Madison University, he sold burglar alarms. Then it was life insurance for about a year and a half. ``Made enough money to not go broke.''
He sold vacuum cleaners for a while. One day he was demonstrating a vacuum and burned a hole in the rug of a Navy chaplain.
The chaplain forgave him, but Peterson bagged vacuums in favor of stocks, surviving the market crash in '87. Later, he worked for Sovran bank as a trust officer until it merged with C&S and he ``got shown the street.''
These days, Peterson sells technical advice as much as he pitches GE's 100,000 products. Many of GE's 6,000 North American salespeople have engineering degrees. That helps when selling complicated switchgear and lighting systems. Peterson's degree is in broadcast communications.
``Some engineers, in my opinion, are myopic,'' Peterson says. ``I call it the dinner plate mentality. If you moved their dinner plate 10 inches, they'd starve.''
Peterson is not much for the good-old-boy approach.
``I'm a believer that a salesman should have a purpose in life other than to stand around and talk football,'' he says, stacking a luggage cart with product manuals to pass around at the Ford plant.
Inside the plant, he acts like a Ford employee rather than a GE salesman. He drives a Ford Taurus even though GE gets its fleet cars from General Motors.
``When I saw the listing for new cars and it said `Lumina,' I said, `Boss, you don't want me driving Ford engineers to lunch in a Chevy Lumina,' '' Peterson recalls.
The Taurus is one of the job's perks. He pays $150 a month and can drive it 7,500 miles each year for personal use. GE also pays $50 a month toward his cellular phone bill.
Peterson works on commission. He gets a portion of the profit margin of what he sells. If a customer beats him down on price, he gets less. There is a wide range of income for industrial salespeople - anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000 a year. ``I've heard it said that being a salesman is either the easiest, lowest-paid profession, or one of the hardest, highest-paid,'' Peterson says.
Building big accounts like Ford takes years of hard work. Peterson has done it by learning Ford's history, studying its mechanics and knowing its workers.
``If people like you and trust you, they'll teach you their business,'' he says. ``People like doing business with people they like - that's what it boils down to.''
Peterson is as likable as they come.
He gets to work early, so he can be home at a decent hour to spend the evenings with his wife, two sons and two daughters. Tuesday nights are Cub Scouts. Wednesdays it's choir practice. Thursdays it's Boy Scouts. Fridays it's practice with a Christian rock band.
Somewhere in there, Peterson studies his business and his customers. He's read the book ``Ford: The Man and the Machine,'' which he picked up at a yard sale for 50 cents.
Walking through the Ford plant, he points out a certain air compressor that's been there since 1925. Or where the original Holophane lights are still in place.
Peterson points to some light fixtures that it took him 2 1/2 years to persuade Ford to upgrade. He moves through the plant, popping into offices and leaving business cards or product manuals when no one's there. ``A lot of selling at a place like this is by happenstance,'' he says. ``These guys are like ants on an anthill. You might go for four visits without seeing the guy you want to see.''
Like today. The man he came to see was tied up.
Peterson also misses out on a sale at Newport News Shipbuilding. The massive shipyard spends about $1 million each month on ``X-orders,'' essentially ``get it here quick'' items, Peterson says.
The purchaser at Newport News tells Peterson his bid and the winning bid were ``too close to spit between.'' That hurt. But he thanks the guy for giving him a shot.
``I'm not worried about today's commission check,'' Peterson says of losing a sale, ``because if I did my job right six months ago, that's taken care of.''
Also taken care of, for now, are the malfunctioning lights at the hospital. The manufacturer agreed to replace the faulty ballasts and pay the hospital's labor costs.
``All in all, the hospital's not too mad,'' Peterson says. ``We could be bleeding all over this, but we're not.''
If Peterson had run from the troubles, he would've been the one doing the bleeding.
His sale. His problem. MEMO: Coming tomorrow: Meet one of those annoying telemarketers. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
LAWRENCE JACKSON
The Virginian-Pilot
Follow-up is crucial in industrial sales, says Alan Peterson, who
works for GE Supply. He promises to be there if things go wrong.
KEYWORDS: SALES by CNB