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Every once in a while, I bring you some valuable insights and ideas to help you build your business. Today is going to be a great day because I have with me a dear friend and colleague, Stewart Jones. Stewart, how are you doing?
Wonderful. Very humbly, I would say Stewart, in a way, guided my initial path at Unilever, and then together, we ended up co-creating something that revolutionized the way the food solutions business worked at the time. We ended up cascading and driving it. The biggest topic here is the concept of managing through others, managing through third parties, and through distributors.
How do you drive the pull out from the customers? But before we dive into the topic, I really want to spend a bit of time asking Stewart, what have you been doing over the last decade or so in your life, man? It’s been a decade since we worked together, I guess.
But we were working together for ten years, so I think we’ve been working together on and off for 20. Absolutely, I’ve been working on and off for 30 years, from the bottom to the top in sales and marketing, starting in brand marketing, and going through customer, and finding my sweet spot in the foodservice market, which is a bit of both sales and marketing.
For the last 20 years, I’ve been specializing in developed markets and underdeveloped markets, like the Middle East and Africa. I’ve been based in South Africa for the last 20 years, and yeah, I’ve been working in the food service sector for the vast majority of that, still doing so.
Absolutely. Stewart was leading the food service division as the sales and marketing director for the Middle East, South Africa, and the region. He spent some time with us here in the Middle East, looking at alternative routes to market.
I remember you said something to me the other day, “Ramez, I’ve spent the last 10 or 15 or 28-plus years, promising or fulfilling promises to shareholders.” Can you tell us a little bit about that, Stewart?
Look, I’ve done a lot of marketing in my life, but I’m a trained marketer and a natural salesperson, and I love sales. For the last 20 years or so, I’ve been on leadership teams, old boards as a sales director, effectively. And the buck stops with you. So if you have to deliver the growth that you promise. If the shareholders and the business want 2 or 3% growth, you can’t just say you’re going to give it to them. You’ve got to find a way to give it to them. I don’t like making unfulfilled promises, so I’ve developed a set of techniques and processes to try and control that growth and make sure that I deliver the promise.
I think here, you know, the percentages are just a symbol because I know the percentages are not just 2 or 3%. They’re usually in the double digits, high double digits. And being able to do that. One thing I think you once told me is, “I like surprises, but only for my birthday, not on the sales results.”
Today, many business leaders and sales leaders are leaving it up to chance. Markets are growing; there’s natural organic growth happening, and they’re pretty much dependent on the natural growth of the market. Today, as it’s becoming more and more competitive, it’s definitely not sustainable.
Here today, to give you some insights in terms of what you can do as a leader in sales, whether you are managing a direct sales team or a team of distributors, we’ll discuss some principles that you can apply to take your business to the next level.
Yeah, that’s for sure. Just to build on what you said, when I first started working in my 20s in the UK and Europe, growth of even 2% was so hard-fought. You had to fight for market share. Every execution you did had to be excellent. That’s where the real skills were learned. Then you moved to somewhere like Africa or the Middle East, where growth was so easy for 10 or 15 years that the skills weren’t developed locally. Now you have to fight for every percentage. Sometimes the percentages are big, but only normally when you open a new market or something.
You still have to fight for it the way you used to fight for one share at a time, one store at a time. I learned those skills back in the day as opposed to in these areas of great growth. I think these are some of the fundamentals that we brought together when we partnered during the Unilever days, coming from a direct sales, door-to-door experience, and then bringing in the concept of solution selling within the food service industry.
I’d like us to dig into what makes food service selling different from retail selling. From a retail perspective, it’s much more complex, much more exciting. It’s multi-level. You have to consider your customer, your customer’s customers. You’re building your customer’s business, not just your business. You must provide solutions to your customers, the operators. You can’t just sell a product. A product is just a means to an end for them, a tool to make or save money.
In the end, money talks. There’s very little emotion in business, believe it or not. It’s all about profit, ultimately. Where the emotion comes in is the menus and the creativity of your operator. Ultimately, they need cost-effective, trustworthy ingredients that provide consistency, that keep their customers coming back.
You’ve got all these different people and considerations to account for every time. It’s that complexity that really appeals to me. In terms of control and sales, you need to think of all these elements as you go through the process.
So, it’s multi-level. In direct sales or multi-level marketing, it’s completely different. Multi-level here means there are different layers within the organization, whether it’s the owner, the F&B manager, the chef, the sous chef, and the people using the ingredients to create the dish. They then sell that dish and start making that little comment. It’s also multi-level because many sell through a third party.
In foodservice, if I’m a principal organization, if I manufacture certain ingredients, I’m selling through a third party very rarely. I will have a direct sales force. That’s another complexity. The delivery economics of food service, which is a relatively small outlet compared to a big supermarket, don’t make sense unless you’ve got a very big range.
Most of the suppliers into the industry supply some sauces, some spices, so there are available items as well. Maybe if it starts being center plate, they’ve got their own distribution. But in the main case, there is a distributor who has that big basket, and we’re a relatively small part of that basket.
That’s a really good point. Let’s tackle this a bit because I think today this is one of the biggest challenges that many of the clients I work with face, whether they are in food service or working through a distributor. How do you get control or share of mind, and how do you ensure that share of mind is properly channeled to deliver the needed results? I know it’s a loaded question, but just break it down one step at a time.
Look, there are numerous issues here. The main thing is to focus on the right product, the right customer channel, and provide a selling solution for that. Then you’ve got to target the sales force involved. That could be yours or a third party. You’ve got to give them a very specific target.
Like what? What type of targets?
Normally, specific sites. When I say sites, you might call them restaurants or operators. I just use the word “site,” but each site is a new point of distribution for us. The main way to grow in the food service sector, where you can’t control the number of consumers coming into the restaurant—that’s out of our control—we can only control distribution to the target that we will give a salesperson: new distribution for a new SKU.
So, the fastest-growing SKU in a customer’s portfolio would be the first target product launched into a new distribution. When you get a new distribution site, that rate of sale—say it was a tomato sauce, for example—will be consistent across the channels. The target is normally new distribution in a target channel with a target SKU, a profitable SKU. Then you have to monitor so that you know what the guy is doing. You know that sales time is organized, they know where they’re hunting, and you’re monitoring what they’re doing every week. Then you need to align rewards for everyone.
We talk about multi-level. There is the management of the distributor, the regional manager, and the rep. All of those guys and the customer have to make a profit from your product, so all those levels of incentive need to be there. So target, monitor, and reward. It’s a very insightful concept here.
I’m just going to dig a little bit. Of course, we all know the basics that whatever you measure improves, and whatever you reward follows the same path. But from what I’m understanding from you, today the job of a distributor sales rep or a salesperson is to grow business. They don’t control the rate of sale, but they can control the penetration or coverage within the market. Their job is to really go out and hunt. Their job is to go out there and drive additional outlets.
AD is the word. Add one new SKU to an existing customer, or to an existing outlet site, or add one new site. It’s all about growing that distribution across the outlet. Particularly in markets such as this, where you’re based in the Middle East, there are so many thousands of independents—100,000 in Saudi alone. You get
that in the restaurants and hotels. If you want to sell a product like chicken or a coffee creamer, you’ve got to get to all those outlets.
That’s the challenge again. But you’ve got to pick the right partner, whether it’s your own distribution or your distributor, and you’ve got to go out there and get more outlets. Let’s talk a bit about this target thing or monitoring. One of the challenges in this region is that very few organizations have the infrastructure to properly monitor the whereabouts of their teams, the level of conversation, the focus of conversations—are they meeting the right person, talking about the right product at the right frequency? Because, again, selling a complex product, making it into a solution, might require more than one visit. If it takes four visits to make a sale of a certain recipe or concept, and then you only visit the outlet once, it’s not going to convert.
Just from your experience, what are some of the best practices in monitoring when there is no technology? And when there is technology, what are some of these tools?
Okay, they’re coming. When we first started working together 20 years ago, there was no data. The big difference between selling into retail and selling in foodservice was that we had Nielsen data in retail. There was so much data. You knew everything. In foodservice, we had none. We’ve been on a data journey in the foodservice channel trying to get data, and most distributors these days have a good source of data.
The only problem is it’s far too complicated. Every product is recorded, sold to every site, and you’ll get a sales report that’ll be 25 by 8,000 pages long, and that’s completely useless to us. The trick that worked for me and that I advise is to keep the information really simple. All we need to know is which sites we are selling to, in which channels, and what SKUs we are sending. We do want to measure things weekly. The reason for that is I like to manage forwards, not backward. And if you only get monthly data, you know you can’t look forward to the end of the month.
But those are some of the key things with monitoring. It’s then about using the best electronics we can to get it to people rapidly, measuring where they are and where they travel. That’s a very different area, obviously very important for a manager. If I can’t have that kind of technology and know that they’re doing eight calls a day with their sales CRM system, we potentially don’t even want to drown in that kind of technology, to be honest.
Not really. Not now, at least. I don’t think so. But you can measure the result. If I measure whether he’s adding a site, that’s fine. He might not be following your perfect process, but he’s getting my results. If he’s not getting results, then he’s not doing what I’ve asked him to do. So I measure the results more importantly than the presence time. Look, some sales forces and some companies have that kind of monitoring, and we’ve used it. We’ve been using that recently in South Africa, but it’s not essential. That’s what I’m saying. Don’t drown in the data. Just make sure you’ve got one analyst who can perform some sales reports, and we can control the time.
Thank you for that, Stewart. One of the questions is about data. You said something very simple, right? You said, “Go to specific outlets and go with specific SKUs.” What a lot of my clients tell us is that even that basic level is hard for them to implement because, for whatever reason, the team gets distracted, they end up being reactive, clients call them, so they’re not able to go. When we did some time and motion studies with salespeople, we found out that a third of their time is spent selling, a third is sales admin, and a third is non-sales admin—like being in meetings or doing stuff that has nothing to do with selling. So just from your experience, how can you help leaders out there get some ideas to free up their teams to be able to do more face-to-face time with customers?
There’s a famous statement that I admire: “Structure follows strategy.” It’s all about roles and responsibilities. Structure follows strategy. So strategy: What do we want to be in food service? What are we going after as a distribution organization or as a principal organization? Let that end goal help you build the structure that you’re going to deliver. And it’s the roles and responsibilities that are different. People are making a team. What you’re describing is a sales manager or someone who’s managing a sales region, not someone who’s growing it. So there are different roles again, clichéd, but push and pull.
In food service, we have to push stock from a warehouse. If your customers are not pulling it out of the warehouse, no one’s going to push it out the door. So we often have a different role for managing the distributor or managing the accounts that phone you with problems—deliveries, customer service—as opposed to the prospect person who is adding a new SKU to a new outlet. They have clarity of mind and clarity of thought in that role. That might be a new prospect called the daddy and no one calling him about problems because he’s not the area.
So yeah, not the sales management lesson is the come-together God. What’s really coming to mind here is, you know, you talk about managing a territory versus growing a territory and being able to have the roles to be able to free up the sales hunters to go out and do the job. I was once talking with an MD of a direct sales force, and his team was actually, probably doing less than 20% selling time.
When I just took on simplifying, he had about ten people on his team. On average, let’s say he’s paying them 10,000 dirhams on a monthly basis. So ten times ten is a hundred thousand times twelve is 1.2 million. So I told him, “Imagine you’re paying 1.2 million in salaries, but you’re only getting 20% of that salary rate to deliver on your sales growth goals.”
Look, the growth team must be paid by the growth team, and the management team must be paid by the continuous business. You need to be careful of those margins over time. Look, Salesforce structure is quite complicated because the distributor head, the way they’re probably operating, they’re probably not prospecting for as much as they need to. Sometimes a client, a provider, or an ingredient supplier may have their own pull team out there actually developing business. The distributors are all different, but most of those guys are often focused on servicing an account and a customer base, and they’re there just to take orders—order replenish orders.
Now, unfortunately, in terms of who we want to partner with, that’s not really going to grow our brand through that partner. You need to understand who is going to grow the distributor. I love this conversation where today, whether you are running a factory with certain products or ingredients and you sell in retail, many people know that growth is happening in foodservice, and they’re deciding to just go, “Let’s just go foodservice.”
And to them, it feels like it’s like a button. Let’s just find a distributor and let’s just give them the products. Then the products are sold into the distributor. So it’s being pushed in, but then it’s stuck. It gets stuck. It’s not being pushed out. That’s what you’re describing. You need to realize part of us is selecting our distributors and looking at criteria that actually align with our goals. What criteria must we look at when partnering to achieve our goal, vision, and what we want to do?
That goes through identifying the multiple infrastructure, the capability of the distributor, their current reach, their current customers—does that match our range of products? Do they have a complementary range? Because if I bring a certain product that is going to go along as one item in a basket versus already having 5 or 6 items in the basket, I can add value within the client’s organization. All of those things are considerations, right?
So, we’ve often done this ourselves in the past. If we’re opening a new country or if we want to expand our distribution in foodservice, we’ve got to consider a lot of those items, but it’s not a standard list. Depending on the client, you’ve got to customize a list of what you want.
One of the things you missed out on there was financial stability, of course. That’s a given. Not everyone always pays the bills, right? At the end of the day, a distributor is actually running the bank for the clients. So they play a very important financial role between us and our customers.
There’s just another consideration. You have to have the right kind of data. They’ve got to have the right sales infrastructure, depending on what we want to do. So if we’ve got a pull team, then we only need somebody to do deliveries. But if we need to grow, then we need them to have a large sales force that has enough time to actually focus on growing sales.
So that’s dedicated sales force or dedicated time share of mind that we get from the distributor.
Share of mind. So first, it needs to be dedicated in terms of process, where they would be out there not just servicing deliveries, but actually trying to grow sales. I’ve done this. The challenge is then share of mind. Even if we had our own distribution business, the same thing is true. If you have your own distribution business, you’ve got a broad range. If you’re a distributor, you’ve got a massive range. Item three, 10,000 outlets.
Share of mind is everything.
It depends on us as a client, which range we’ve got, how important we are. We need to punch above our weight. So our objective is to always get more share of mind than our share of business. There are numerous techniques to do that. Firstly, helping people. If you help those reps or managers at distributors make more money, then they will like you. It’s not all about being Father Christmas. But the principle is, if a distributor can add new distribution for your range, they will focus on it.
You get back to trading terms, agreement incentives. Same with the reps. They earn money on commission. Most of them. And you can get double commission if you’ve got a new site. So yeah, it’s all around alignment to get share of voice—alignment of everything from the incentives to the target, the money to the reward, aligning all of that across the board.
Also, communicating with them, your own services, training them. They may well be experienced sales reps in a region, but they’re maybe not well trained to actually sell, let alone sell your specific product. That’s where your expertise comes in, in training those guys, and they appreciate that.
You only do that with the partners you’ve chosen, and you’re right—those that actually give, and then you’re going to get something in return. Actually, just building on what you said, when working with distributor sales teams, we went and identified the WIIFM (What’s in it for me?). Money was one of the motivations, but what came even higher than money was certifications—working with an organization that is investing in me, that is allowing me to grow. Today I’m with this company. I’d like to stay with them, but I don’t see myself staying if I can’t learn and grow. People start a sales job—I started selling knives 35 years ago and never thought I’d build a career in sales, but that’s the reality.
Today, I teach at the executive MBA level, and the number one job that all these MBAs will get, whether they are MBAs or masters of international business, is a business development role. If you’re an MBA, you’re getting a director or a VP role. If you’re an MBA, you’re getting a manager or a director role. If you’re a master’s student who just graduated, your first job is as a BBR, DSR—you’re going out there and making things happen.
So again, it’s just these basic fundamentals that, as you said, it’s understanding the WIIFM, and learning is definitely something that people can benefit from. Building on what I’ve just mentioned, learning is a motivation. Not all people will have that yet, but there are enough of them.
Going back to the concept of selecting your distributor, tell me a little bit about how you prioritize who you work with and how you build a relationship. We know that not all customers are the same or equally important. All are important, but some are more important than others. Same thing with your distributors, right?
100%. I think we should probably talk about outlets, just not at length, but targeting the distributors. Basically, the logistics or their capabilities and their reach. How are their capabilities? The delivery that just makes national coverage, things like that, and their actual reach. How many customers could they get? What portfolio do they have? Their financial status is also quite important. They need to have economic deliveries; otherwise, their business won’t be stable. They need center items. They need a good portfolio, potentially. They need a portfolio that’s appropriate for our customer base.
For example, we’ve got to have target channels. If it’s a coffee bar versus a restaurant, we need a very different portfolio in that distributor for a coffee bar than we do for a restaurant. So we have different partners. We just need to prioritize these guys and focus because they’re investing in training, targeting, and monitoring, and rewarding. We only want to do that with a select few. We generally work around a joint business plan with a leadership team to agree on the priorities between us. Because if the relationship is not that important, then we’re not the right partner. Target them, lock in with them, then deliver.
I love what you’ve mentioned. If what we agree on is not important, then there is no point in us agreeing. So the beginning of a partnership is agreeing on a common goal, having a clear vision where that distributor and our principal organization, both of us, have to be aligned. When there is alignment, that’s when the magic happens.
Alignment of all of these people is critical, and it goes beyond the distributor to the customers and then the customers and consumers. That’s the beauty of the food service market. When new companies or organizations are setting up, building a new product, ingredient, etc., a lot of them target what we call the obvious targets—the big organizations, the chains, the ones with many outlets. So you go to one deal and you can crack that. You get the fact that in ours, there’s some critical mass going. Anything you can share with us on that as part of a strategic approach to growing a food service business?
You often talk about one-to-many. It’s at every level of the food service organization. Chains are obviously easier to start with. Believe it or not, many obviously need good key account management skills, but you need a customized solution for a chain because the brand identity of the chain and its following is based on their taste and their flavor.
So it’s always a customized product. That’s generally a different organization or part of an organization that’s different from the branded range that you also sell. The branded range can go from work for one to many with small chains, where a flexible, versatile product can be adopted by their chef team, for example, by adding a little bit of chili to a mayonnaise to give it their signature.
They are normally flexible enough to use a branded product. Remember, our brand is only trust, reliability, and consistency, but the enterprise, the chain, is about trust, reliability, and consistency. So I have to be reliable. I have to deliver the product. I need to make sure that if they need it, I have it.
Trust again is about it’s always consistent. It won’t let you down. If I can deliver that to a chain, that’s removing a headache. Because if I have a core ingredient that’s missing, that changes my entire flavors, and it will be impacted, thus impacting my brand.
Unlike consumer brands, where there’s an emotional tie, in food service, the brand is functional reliability. It’s sometimes also flavor profile. A very popular consumer brand is one the consumers like. For example, so you know, it’s Heinz ketchup, Heinz mayonnaise, or another similar brand. There is some brand value that it’s a number-one brand in a market.
So if you’re a small chain, you want that base flavor because consumers like it, and then you just tailor it. Brands are a bit different. Today, I’ll target chains. That’s one key distinction. And then eventually, once I’ve covered those, theoretically, I have the right chains. Then and only then will I possibly direct the efforts to go mass coverage because now I’m going after the 80% that represents the 20% or something like that.
Look, those chains are valuable but difficult. They’re complicated, complex. You’ve got to have different recipes for everything. Your branded range needs to be the backbone of your business, but there is a lot more complex route to market. The one-to-many that we talk about means that you generally have to go to that distributor and then out to the 100,000 restaurants in Saudi, or the 70,000 restaurants in the UAE, or the 30,000 in South Africa.
You’ve got to go through a distributor to actually get to those guys. A lot of businesses have been doing that for a long time, though. A lot of branded businesses don’t customize, so chains don’t really figure. I love to experience those kinds of businesses. At Unilever, we didn’t customize anything.
So if you want to buy Hellman’s products, you’re just going to buy Hellman’s products. You’re not going to buy a pink Hellman’s or whatever. Not at all. Different approaches for different companies. But if you want to get to that broader independent base and balance your portfolio, you generally don’t want all your eggs in one basket with one or two chains. You’ve got no security if that chain changes its recipe or ingredient. That’s a big risk because all of your events are being paid by that. So you need to spread your risk and build an independent business that you preferably control yourself. A lot of time there’s a gap between knowing what to do and doing what you know.
People say, “Oh, I know I should do that, but I don’t do it.” Although we work with distributors and clients, and they eventually understand the concept of how they should transform, it’s not as easily done as it is said.
Maybe we can share some of the experiences that we’ve had in terms of working or co-creating stuff, so kind of building those habits and getting better buy-in from it.
It’s all about management of change. Ultimately, if you’re going to try and change the way an organization behaves, you’ve got to transform from one way of doing things to a new way of doing things. You’ve got to take them through that journey. No one will change if you just say one day, “Okay, this is the way we want you to work. Stop the way you’ve been working for 20 years and start to do it the way that Ramez says.” It doesn’t work like that.
What I’ve enjoyed in the last few years, in particular, is going into an organization, working with the
management teams so that we can co-create the models. Using the framework so that we both understand the targeting model of where we want to hunt, or distribute, the targeting model of how we want to partner, or even the sales approach of what we want to sell to a GP.
You need to go into the organization and get the buy-in from the management teams. When I say buy-in, it means everything. It’s got to be co-created. There isn’t a textbook answer to a distributed targeting model. Every one needs to be made specifically, and those managers need to create it. They need to create it and they need to own it.
Sorry to say, it’s not all about training. It’s about workshops where you work together as a team with management teams and design the new process. Then you cascade that process through the organization, and you slowly get them used to it. You probably also don’t do it across the whole organization in one go. You’ve got to potentially take one region at a time or one country at a time. As we used to do, when you were the managing director of Unilever USA, we’d have to go and open up a new country and train those reps that month, and then hold their hand on and off for a good few months, or in your case, continuously.
In my case, just for a couple of months while they got set up. But yeah, it’s about managing change and there’s a lot of resistance to the change. You mentioned people’s desire to learn. That’s true. A lot of people are like that, but a lot of people like the old way. Especially if the old way is not very economical, and they’re not quite working as hard as they could. For example, there are lots of reasons why these new behaviors sound good but are very difficult to land in practice. So you’ve got to win hearts and minds.
I’ll build on that. In organizations where we’ve had buy-in from the management team, the leadership team, to take the time to build it from the ground up, the change happened and it stuck. In organizations where the leadership team says, “Oh, you’ve got to do this with the team,” we look back and say, “Well, our experience says this is not going to work.”
In a way, it’s a no-go because if they’re not willing to go through this transformation, then it’s a waste of time. It becomes a tick-box exercise. That alignment has to be throughout the leadership team, buying into this as how we’re going to transform as an organization from the way we used to do things to the way we want to be doing things, because it aligns with our mission, vision, and goals. Missions and visions that still utilize old technologies are going to be quickly outdated.
This conversation could have happened at a couple of different scales. When we’re transforming an entire organization, there’s a great book by Jim Collins called “Good to Great,” and you need to have the right people on the bus. There are people who want to grow as individuals, build skills, and bring themselves into a more structured selling approach or whatever. And there are people who don’t want to be in that kind of organization, unfortunately. So, in which case, if we’re going to be moving to a new model, we need people who are going to get on the bus.
If we’re not operating at that structural scale, then fine. But I think the other thing that’s important is don’t try and teach them something that they’re not going to make more money from or that’s not going to enrich them. If they’re not going to be enriched by learning and they are just enriched in their job and getting rewarded, you need to make sure that they know by following what you’ve asked them to do, they’re going to earn more money. Greed will drive the process.
Unfortunately, with sales teams, that’s often the case. If it’s going to affect them, they’re more likely to do something about it. They need to see results.
Absolutely. I often think that helping them do it the first time—little things like that—one thing I’ve always prided myself on, and yourself as well, is that we’re very capable of leveling with people and having empathy at all levels. That’s important here. Talking as an external person, particularly one like me with an English accent and a slightly African/Afrikaans accent, and coming out and saying, “This is what you must do,” you can’t do that. You’ve got to empathize with people and understand that their livelihood has been based on what they’ve been doing and that they’re scared and you’re challenging them. So you’ve got to relate to people at all levels to make something like this change. I’ve always loved that about you—you relate to people and take them with you.
It’s a journey, this transformation. We’re taking this organization on a journey with us. The leaders need to let their teams know it’s not an overnight success. It’s a journey of transformation and it’s never-ending. What we’re seeing today is the speed at which people and companies have to evolve their processes and systems. That speed is accelerating, so it’s a never-ending evolution.
Look, it’s often a revolution, not an evolution. I must admit, my passion is the revolution piece—let’s really make a change. But obviously, there are lots of businesses at different stages, and a lot of people have started these journeys. A lot of people are very good at some of this stuff. So there are evolutionary pieces as well as revolutionary pieces. I must admit, I really enjoy big change. I’ve always enjoyed big growth and those kinds of changes, but they don’t come across all the time. Not every company needs to revolutionize its sales approach. They need to just evolve it and fine-tune it.
One particular area might be just the targeting, the data, or the evolution. Between us, we’ve got a very big spectrum of techniques that could be applied to all kinds of organizations at all kinds of stages. I mean, we just need to be sensitive to that.
Absolutely. In the age of AI, artificial intelligence, will we need salespeople in the future?
Hey, look, I think relationships… I think we could write a good questioning tree, and that machine would get down to what the chef needs, but the chef would never blossom with a machine. The chef needs to see empathy in your eyes. If they didn’t have that connection, it wouldn’t work.
I think you taught me, probably, but people buy from people they like. I’ve made a special effort in my life to try and make friends with everyone. I don’t think AI is ever going to be my friend.
So I think in the food service arena, possibly not. There are ways AI can definitely help us, particularly in terms of planning, CRM, who we need to talk to, how we need to dive into the data. There’s a plethora of stuff that I don’t even understand yet that can help us from a systems approach.
But chefs don’t buy from people they don’t know and trust. They also don’t buy without tasting. So unless an AI computer is going to come and give them a sample of that product—maybe a robot—but yeah, I don’t know.
When I was asked that question at the university, I told the students, “There will be no need for salespeople in the future if what they’re selling is a meta-product.” In other words, if I can go online and buy it without any interaction with you, if that’s my need, I don’t even need you. However, for the salesperson today, especially in food service, it’s about selling a solution. So I’m not just showing up to sell you a product. I’m looking at the trends, what’s happening in the market, what data consumers want, how I’m going to help you differentiate your outfit. I’ll bring you insights, ideas, recipes, and ingredients. Now we’re getting a full solution. Building that relationship, understanding how to position your approach with a chef, barista, or bar owner is key.
Look, it’s very interesting. You’ve got me thinking now. I mean, I guess the Heinz ketchup buyer could probably do it. And for a distributor to take a repeat order, there is a process here, and we need to evolve.
What we said at the start of this conversation was that food service is a special piece of business-to-business. It’s not all about food service. Most of this is, or can be, about business-to-business as well, not just food service. I think AI could be quite important.
Absolutely. Just as a way of wrapping things up here, we spoke predominantly about the foodservice channel. Yet today, we know foodservice is a B2B2C type of model. Many of the principles can apply to other organizations that do a B2B type of approach. Maybe a question or two: How do we help our audiences who are managing their own direct teams or teams selling through a distributor maximize the ROI that they’re getting from the sales force? What kind of techniques or thoughts do we have around targeting models?
Where do I spend my time? Time is money. If I have resources, I have salespeople. Regardless of whether they’re in food service or selling engine parts, the same theory applies. You need to spend your time profitably, so you need to allocate a certain amount of time to maintaining relationships, a certain amount of time for prospecting for new business. People’s time needs to be allocated cost-effectively. The simplest process of doing that is prioritization models, customized for each business, that say, “Who are my top prospects, and what are my top products?” Literally, you just need to match those two. Hence, we get back to target, monitor, and reward
. But it’s that time allocation—where am I calling?
I remember a long time ago, we had a business that basically had 3,000 outlets, and they would call on every outlet every month for 15 minutes.
Wow.
Right? Just to say hello, to show their face, to build a relationship. One of the first things we did was focus that sales force on the 80% of customers who were our current core business and the 20% of customers who were our prospects for new business. We made them 40-minute calls instead of 15-minute calls because there can’t be any value in a 15-minute call. We called on them once a month if they were in a priority group. So you classify customers as platinum, gold, silver. Then there’s a contact strategy. Contact strategy equals time allocation. Then you have the target, monitor, and reward, and you can draw the cash out of it.
I think there’s a lot of business-to-business foodservice practice here in terms of the models that we apply, particularly to make sure we get the best return on our salaried investment, whether it’s AWS or third parties. A lot of this applies to key accounts, right? It’s the same thing. There’s a contact strategy for each type of customer, with each type of salesperson, and in each kind of organization. Believe it or not, a lot of companies still don’t have those kinds of time allocation models.
That’s where one of the things we specialize in is helping an organization ensure that they’re covering their entire client base. Just simple time allocation, looking at frequency, so you can realize, “Can I cover the number of hours that I have?” I’d even build on this, as to where the contact strategy doesn’t just mean the frequency. It also looks at who is the best person to contact the client.
So we have telesales, which is a way of reaching a customer on the phone. You don’t need to visit them every single week or every single month. Depending on the objective of the calls, there are customers who love to hear from us, maybe by email or written communication. Today we have WhatsApp, and there are automations on WhatsApp. There are so many different ways that still get us to engage with the customer. Today, more and more organizations have to look at a holistic approach—sales support and technology coming together to really give the buyer’s journey, give them that unique experience, give them that differentiation so that we have a common facade. We are as strong as the weakest link.
If one of these contact points fails, then the whole chain fails.
Contact strategy, I agree with you, is extremely important. In some small way, what we’re saying is to start some kind of customer relationship management.
That’s right. Customer acquisition is absolutely king, especially when we’re in the independent sector. But it might not be about acquisition; it might be about growing a customer that you’re managing. It’s all customer relationship management and trying to do that as professionally as you can for the best return on your investment in your staff.
Wonderful. I mean, the time flew by like this. I could spend another week talking with Stewart about good old war stories and successes. I’m really excited to have Stewart available in this region. Feel free to reach out to us if there are things that you would like us to help support. I’m really excited about that partnership we’re bringing together.
Yeah, me too. My purpose in life is to share and grow people. Ramez is a natural trainer who’s always wanted to train. My mother was a school teacher. I’ve always wanted to teach. I have this set of skills, and my purpose in life is to share that set of skills with people who can become more. In my world, that’s my spiritual purpose. That’s why I’m here—to help people go forward. I’m really looking forward to doing that in this region.
You know, the famous “inspire one more”—if you remember that, I’m actually wearing little cuffs that were given to me by Allen Allen Bell, another one of our consultants. Allen, this one is for you, buddy. Inspire one more. Together, we’re going to inspire a lot more.
Absolutely. Thanks, Ramez.
Pleasure. Until then, sell more, sell faster, and profitably.
