March 10, 2025 • 58 mins
Join us for an engaging episode as we dive into the transformative power of data in the sales environment with Nick Mavrick from Built Data. In this conversation, we explore how a new approach to data can unlock the potential of sales teams seeking to enhance their performance. Nick shares insights on how Built Data yields actionable intelligence, allowing sales professionals to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
We discuss the common struggle of overwhelming data and how Built Data bridges this gap, ensuring that sales teams not only collect data but effectively utilize it to prioritize high-value customers. A critical discussion point is the 80-20 rule—how focusing on a small percentage of clients can significantly boost a company's revenue and why understanding customer behavior is foundational for building long-term, trust-based relationships.
Nick emphasizes the necessity of moving away from traditional sales approaches that often overlook the importance of listening. Instead, by fostering strong customer relationships, professionals can navigate new challenges and adapt to the ever-evolving equipment rental industry landscape.
This episode is filled with valuable insights and strategic advice for anyone looking to improve their sales techniques and enhance their engagement with customers. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to rethink how data can empower your sales efforts. Join us for an enlightening discussion and be sure to subscribe for future insights that can help elevate your sales game!
Visit us at LearningWithoutScars.org for more training solutions for Equipment Dealerships - Construction, Mining, Agriculture, Cranes, Trucks and Trailers.
We provide comprehensive online learning programs for employees starting with an individualized skills assessment to a personalized employee development program designed for their skill level.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Aloha and welcome to our candid conversation.
Today we're joined by NickMaverick of Built Data.
Nick has a very unique view onselling that is much more
professional, much moreanalytical, much more pointed
(00:26):
than the good old boy drivingaround in a truck saying hello
to people.
So, with that as theintroduction, I'd like to have
Nick spend some time explainingto us what built data does.
So, Nick, the ball's in yourcourt, my friend.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Well, ron, thank you for A the time with you, B being
a blessing and your world ofgood and the opportunity to
learn from you and your team andall the contributors.
It's the single best learningmechanism, I believe, not only
for the industry but even folksoutside of the industry.
So, thank you, you're welcomeand I wish I lived in a home who
(01:07):
is Nick Magbrick.
Well, I am a student of life andthe industry and, to just alter
some of the narrative, I'velearned so much from listening
to the field and I was probablyin my early thirties.
(01:28):
I've learned so much fromlistening to the field and I was
probably in my early 30s and Ithought I was a good listener.
I was certainly raised to behumble and there was a sales guy
, his name's Keith, and when Iworked at Volvo Rents and he
said you don't listen.
And he was right.
It's the listening when peoplesay nothing.
And the behavioral side of mostof my career has been as a
(01:52):
generalist.
But the longest length of mycareer was in marketing,
supporting sales forces in theconstruction equipment rental
industry and of latelydealerships, construction
equipment dealerships and earlyin my career I learned to count
to 10.
And the notion is theexpression of disproportionate
(02:15):
data and, just to sum it up,would be called the 80-20 rule
and it doesn't mean data 20% ofthe customers do 80% of your
business.
It means that it just meanslopsided and pay attention to
the proportions.
So built data was formed for afew reasons.
One is to serve the field, toserve sales persons as a
(02:39):
behavioral tool to put valuablemarket intel, whether it's
internal or external, at theirfingertips in three clicks.
And the second reason was toprovide a direct connection to
management so they could link,or they should be called field
support, where field support andsalespersons can speak the same
(03:02):
language about the customer.
So provide them an equal dataset that can either be observed
centrally and all the way at thefield, where they can see, have
a unified view of the customer.
It's actually one of your recentblog posts I think it might
have been today or yesterdaytalking about how to treat the
(03:23):
customer with love, and the bestdealerships and the highest
performing rental operationsspoil their VIP customers and
dealerships have an advantagethat in many instances, I think,
is maybe they're not fullyaware of their strengths, which
(03:45):
is local ownership, and, yes,some dealerships are not locally
owned.
However, the notion of, as Iunderstand it, as the industry
was born and dealers and rentalcompanies really smothered their
best customers with a betterunderstanding of their needs so
(04:05):
they could do their job, andwhen you pay attention to what
you do, well, try to do more ofit.
As opposed to many companiesthat I talked to today, would
say they have too much data,everything's shouting at them,
their CRM, their point of sale,their ERP could be their
(04:28):
e-commerce systems or onlinesystems, and they have so much
data.
So they went from a dearth ofdata to now so much data that
they can't distill signal fromnoise.
So I hope that gives you alittle bit of a background of
what we do.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
I think that's really valid.
I hope that gives you a littlebit of a background of what we
do.
I think that's really valid.
You know there's a series ofthings that are true about
business to business and I guessthe fundamental point is
everybody looks at these labelsDIY, dafy, all this stuff, diy,
(05:03):
dafy, all this stuff.
And Steve Clegg, who I knowyou've known and speak to,
reverts everything back to twopeople a buyer and a seller.
Right, and it's about thetransaction and the perpetuation
(05:30):
or the continuation of thattransaction stream is a function
of the relationship and toomany salesmen, particularly in
the capital goods arena, go byand you know how are things
today.
Rarely do they have a purposefor the call.
Rarely do they send minutesback to the customer.
(05:51):
Rarely do they make commitmentswith the customer at each call
of what they're going to do next.
It's much more a PR thing and Ithink you've related to that in
many ways.
Salesmen are very important.
It's a very misunderstood jobfunction.
Everybody thinks it's PR andplaying golf and going to lunch
(06:16):
and hanging around bars at night.
It's none of that.
It's hard work if you're goingto be successful, no doubt.
How do you help salesmen becomemore successful?
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Well, I want to go back to Steve Clegg.
I've had the blessing ofmeeting Steve through you and
Steve, when you and I werespeaking earlier today off the
charts sort of intelligence andunderstanding similar to you I
know you don't like hearing thatand Steve, very simply, he
(06:54):
distilled complexity tosimplicity, just like you did,
and what I've heard Steve say,I've heard you say on multiple
occasions which is about thetransaction, and the transaction
is the behavior.
It's just a photograph of apoint in time, of the behavior,
and Steve and you, who'vecollaborated, look at that
(07:15):
transaction to come up with veryaccurate forecasts.
In the industry.
We don't do that, by the way,and I have enough knowledge of
the space, though, to understandwhat it takes to do it well,
and one of the challenges is theindustry is undergoing a lot of
(07:37):
change, and I shouldn't saythat the water has been getting
hotter over a long period oftime and it's almost
unnoticeable.
And it's new market entrance,whether it's called overseas
iron, it's the shift of rentalor the profound growth of rental
(08:02):
.
The profound growth of rental.
I was referencing a presentationearlier today it was a great
one given by Tom Doyle and BradLull at ConExpo.
It was actually at AEMP thatpreceded this recent, this
couple of years ago, conexpo,and I was referencing it because
I was writing some work forBuilt Data about the growth of
(08:24):
rental and when you look atasset classes and earth moving
in that presentation was quotedat 35% of all heavy equipment is
rented For telehandlers.
(08:50):
I want to say just from memoryit was north of 65, could have
been 75%.
And what's missing in thatconversation is the customer.
And there's a ton of price warsgoing on.
There's conflict between, callit, the OEMs overproducing or
underproducing, the dealer whothey're leaning on to sell
specific things, the dealer whothey're leaning on to sell
specific things, the rentalindustries, which the big three
have tremendous market power andtheir own strengths, and for my
(09:17):
belief is that there's asimpler path.
If I woke up at any one ofthose companies, I would be
somewhat terrified because theenvironment is changing so
quickly.
I think what's really missingis a customer-centric view that
(09:39):
understands, of course, helpingthat person get their job done.
It's not only the margin on therental transaction, it could be
everything else that helps getthe job done Parts and service,
uptime, total cost of ownership,predictable costs for the
contractor so they can make aprofit on their job instead of
(10:00):
this downward spiral.
So if we, if we go back to SteveClegg and forecasting, is what
is the behavioral component?
To link a killer forecast tothe sales manager who's
scripting to a goal for theenterprise and to the
(10:21):
salesperson, who in manyinstances is forced to lie to
their boss and lie by omission,right, that doesn't make you a
fraud, it means you're sort ofkeeping your job and that so
that we principally link, link agoal you can call that a
(10:43):
forecast and transport thatinformation to the salesperson
so they can see the expressionof the 80-20 rule in their data
and giving them a direct linkageso the central office and the
salesperson can operate from thesame sheet of music.
There's also key market intel.
(11:04):
I don't know if you ever readtom riley's book.
Value-added selling, yeah, butwe should be selling value,
right.
I mean, we do a lot of things.
Our equipment rental companiesand dealers do a lot of things
that are actually extremelydifficult delivering uh
equipment on time, billing,accuracy, you know, we can sort
of dumb it down and say, well,how hard is it?
It's hard.
Or how hard can it be?
(11:32):
It's extremely hard.
Prompt pickup and delivery,keeping those machines at uptime
and reporting back to thatcustomer how they're serving
them to increase theirprofitability.
I don't think we do a good jobof that.
So being able to translate theforecast to something that the
salesperson can focus on andknow that they have the back of
their enterprise to deliver onthose promises of uptime, call
it value added, we believeincreases profitability.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
It's a pretty straightforward world if you
really get down to it world ifyou really get down to it.
What's problematic from myperspective is the world around
us.
The commercial world around usis so far ahead of us it is
embarrassing.
You go into a drugstore.
(12:18):
Have you been a customer?
Put your phone number in yeah,so I know everything about you.
I know also what credit cardyou use.
I have signature pads all overthe place.
I have chip payment with acredit card, and how many
(12:41):
dealers do that?
How many dealers have asignature pad?
Whether it's rental or sale, Idon't care, the customer sees
things spectrum, elon Musk'sworld of telematics and
(13:10):
low-grade or low-levelsatellites all of these things
and we don't do any of that.
What Steve is a maniac about,as am I.
Harvard wrote a definitive book, probably 20, 30 years ago now,
called the Service Profit Chain.
That definitively proved thatthe single most important metric
(13:33):
for any business that wants tobe successful is customer
retention.
And Steve's a maniac about that.
He measures customer retention,but he doesn't look at
financial data, he just looks attransactions.
Yeah, super smart world thatwe're struggling, transitioning
(14:04):
to a stakeholder world from ashareholder world.
What I've been calling for 20years that we put profits over
people, customer services hasgone down, and I had a great
chat yesterday with another ofour contributors, david Griffith
, who's the chairman of ModernEquipment, and he gave me one
(14:25):
that I've stolen from him.
We put in greed over ourgrandchildren.
In other words, everything wedo is short term.
So the OEM, as you said,overproduces or underproduces
but they have a buffer at thedealer level.
If they overproduce they givespecial flooring so the OEM
(14:45):
dealer buys the equipment.
Rental is burst overflowbusiness and it's been a
geographic limit in NorthAmerica versus Europe and Asia.
The European percentage ofmachine hours in rental is close
(15:06):
to double what it is in theUnited States and Japan's in the
same category and we reallyhaven't adapted the number of
OEM dealers that are good atrental.
You did that with Volvo,caterpillar did it with Cat
Rents.
There's struggles to do thatbut the big three, like you say,
united and Sunbelt et cetera,those folks have it down to an
(15:30):
art form and they don't have thesame cost structure, they don't
have the same overheadstructure that an OEM dealer
does.
Yeah they have market power?
They clearly do, and the marketpower allows them to be very
powerful.
When it's purchasing time, hugeYep.
But they don't provide anycustomer service.
(15:53):
They just provide a machine Yep.
When the machine goes out, itworks.
If it doesn't, they replace itreal quick.
Some of the old-fashionedrental houses used to put an
operator in the chair, but mostof those have gone.
Now it's typically small firmsthat do that as a means of
getting market share.
But go back to that salesmanagain.
(16:16):
He's driving around in hisvehicle.
Who does he go see?
Why does he go see them?
How do they manage their time?
Because that's the killer for asalesman, isn't it?
How do they make their timemost cost effective?
How do they get the most salesdollars per minute that they can
(16:37):
possibly do it?
And I think that built datagives them tools.
That allows them.
They don't necessarily do it,but it allows them to make very
powerful decisions and effectivedecisions on who they go see
next and what they do with them.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Yeah, and it's so fun to learn.
I keep thinking at some point,oh, I feel like I'm back in my
freshman year.
I don't know if it's highschool or college, but behavior
is one of the hardest things todo.
Or culture, right, pick yourword is one of the hardest
things to pull off in business.
(17:12):
And I find that getting, if Ican say, best customer, and what
does that mean?
Well, let's look at the segmentthat does 10.
Let's look at deciles, let'slook at the top 10% of your
customers and see theircontribution, cool.
Just having that common languagebetween if I'm the salesperson,
(17:34):
you're my sales manager oryou're the CEO, and then you're
talking to your OEM, just havingthat common linkage removes
layers of sort of mistrust,antagonism et cetera.
That breaks companies in half.
And you've talked about theslow bleed before.
I've had a small purview intothat world, which is?
(17:57):
You talked about parts coverageat one point, at one point, and
you would quote a statistic, ifI remember it was one OEM had
its part spent, business haddeclined from 50% to 25.
And I want to say to 18, youknow the number's better than I
do.
And there's a lot of slowbleeding.
(18:20):
And I recently worked with adealer, with meeting, and I
recently worked with a dealerwith I'm going to round the
numbers 10% of their customersdid about 80% of their business
and 100% of their marketingcapital went to the 80% of the
customers doing 20% of thebusiness.
And it gets better um 60 orabout 50, 60 percent of the
(18:50):
entirety mark marketing budgetwent to sgna to spend the other
50.
It's nuts.
And so if you're in a company,um, I'm gonna say it's, it was,
it's lost and it's lost by um.
It forgot what it was good at,it fought, forgot what it was
focused, you know, focused onwhich is serving a small group
(19:11):
of customers and spoiling theheck out of them.
And they're just.
It's a land of confusion and ithas a real human expense and
it's not only leads to lowermargins and you know I'm going
to say it breaks families inhalf.
You know, at the end of the day, a lack of prosperity has huge
(19:35):
downstream, negative you knownegative implications for
society.
And it just starts with acompany they can't get their
bonus, they don't get a raise.
It just starts with a companythey can't get their bonus, they
don't get a raise.
If I can shift into the positive, we have a client where we, by
the way, we're not magicians Idon't want to oversell anything.
(19:58):
We do dirty work, we dig fordata.
Right, you can call it what youwant.
I've done my fair share of it.
It is not fancy.
Sometimes it means Ron Sleewith one E, ron Slee with two
E's, r Slee, and it meansfinding those Ron Slee's in the
three different data sets.
It sucks, but it gives thecompany a unified view of what
(20:22):
you're doing.
So we had one one of our dealerclients recently used this
consolidated data set that theirpeople can get two and three
clicks and their salespeoplethey're planning the year and
they set sales goal and they usebuilt data to retrieve the
information.
That's not that big of a dealin itself.
Now they have a behavioralcomponent where they can track
(20:44):
their progress against the coal.
Even better.
They can actually have themarket intel so they can do
value-added selling to theircustomers and prospects and do
territory management moreeffectively.
It just strips out a lot of thebrain damage from running
around to grift for business.
(21:05):
So we are not magicians.
It's pretty simple.
It's linking the behavior witha unified data set.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
One of the things that's problematic is the
quality of the data.
There's many system providers,erps, or whatever we want to
call them, and use Salesforce asan example.
(21:34):
They have a profile for acustomer Salesforce I'm going to
call it an add-on piece ofsoftware to a business system.
The business system also has aprofile.
Those profiles are not the same.
The two systems, salesforce'sand whoever the dealer
(21:57):
management system is, let mecall those DMSs they don't talk
to each other, or if they do,it's one way.
So now I've got two differentprofiles and I want to get a
report.
So here comes built data.
Okay, nick, where do I go?
Do I go to Salesforce?
Do I go to my DMS, or do I haveto do both and consolidate them
(22:21):
?
And what are you going to do tohelp me with that?
That's part of the dirty workthat you have to do.
Correct, yeah, and on top ofthat, I always said whoever's
(22:42):
closest to the customer wins.
I've also said that as asalesperson, depending on my
geography, I can only deal witha finite number of customers.
Let me just say, arbitrarily,100.
Because I have to drive and oneof the things that we have in
sales management is amisunderstanding of drive time.
(23:05):
I had a fellow up in Ottawa awhole Ottawa, it's across the
Ottawa River up in Quebec,canada, and he did 5,000 miles a
year in his truck.
At 50 miles an hour that's1,000 hours.
So you want to work through2,000 hours in a year.
(23:26):
50% of the time you're sittingin your and this is before cell
phones A, b, it was in an areathat there wasn't cell phone
service.
There will be today withStarlink and things like that,
but this is a while back.
I don't know how many peoplethink that way.
You mentioned I've got anexecutive.
(23:48):
They drive and create astrategy for the company.
The strategy is passed down andtranslated to a bunch of
different departments and thosedepartments make a strategy for
the department and thosedepartments make a strategy for
the department.
(24:11):
No-transcript.
And the illustration you usedwas Caterpillar's parts market
share when I started was 83% in1970, actually 1965.
And I'm talking at a conferencein Mississippi in the early
(24:34):
2000s and the gentleman incharge of and say I know this
isn't a popular question, butwould you mind telling me what
your parts market share is?
And without a hesitation hesaid 38.3% and I thanked him and
let's just arbitrarily say thatwas the year 2000.
So in the 35 years 1965 to 2000, they went from 83% to 38%.
(24:59):
Okay, there's a chapter.
Next chapter is consolidationof dealers.
There's fewer of them today,less of them.
They're bigger by nature.
A bigger organization loses apersonal touch.
Culture, like you indicated, isextremely important.
(25:21):
I always ask groups what do youdo?
And most people can tell youhow do you do it.
Not everybody they want to talkabout poorly or excellent or
whatever the hell.
The real question is why do youdo it?
(25:42):
And I want people to want to doit because they care for and
want to serve other people and aservant's heart is an important
characteristic.
But a lot of people would noteven want to go there.
But that's what it's about.
I need to make you feel goodabout the relationship you have
(26:04):
with me, not what you're buyingfrom me, but me, that I look
after all your needs and wants.
Whenever there's a problem, I'mhere.
It doesn't matter what it is,I'm there, I fix it, and tools
like built data allow me tomaximize that thousand hours if
I'm up in the whole Ottawa areain front of the customer.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Yeah, do you mind if I build on one of your points?
Sure, certainly you mentioned acustomer and the customer has a
name, right?
So when you talk market shareright, that's a bunch of names
(26:49):
added up to market share andit's not that hard.
And that's what's so screwyabout this is, when I look at a
salesperson with a $25 to $50million business, they have a
hundred customers that will do80% of their business.
And well, you could say, well,it's a hundred.
(27:10):
Well, can I partner with you ifI'm in marketing and you're the
salesperson?
Can we figure out what it takesto serve Ron?
Right, and it's one customer?
If I deal with this, even in myown company and how we go to
market, which is, if we don'treally know your name, we
shouldn't be talking, weshouldn't be marketing to you,
(27:30):
we really shouldn't.
If we can't do our homeworkbefore we come in, um, we, we
shouldn't be doing right at all.
And so market share has a name.
It's the law.
I call it the law of smallnumbers, right, and it's the law
of small numbers in threeclicks, and if you don't know
those 100 names, then any roadwill get you there, as the
(27:54):
saying goes.
And I don't know if you, I knowyou're like a student of Charlie
Munger, but he gave a killerspeech.
A lot of it it's about life, butthe speech was he was asked to
speak, I believe, to Harvardcollege, and I believe his son
was graduating, and the speechwas how to live a life of misery
, and he goes through a fewthings, and if you can't plan
(28:21):
market share by the law of smallnumbers, by the law of names,
you're highly likely to live alife of misery, and a lot of
companies are in this shapetoday.
It's tough.
I mean, you're looking at 10%EBIT margins, you're looking at
supermarket type net incomemargins, and that's with price
(28:44):
increases and layoffs, and it'sa shame.
Good news is, though, it can bereversed, and it can be
reversed if you take a specialforces approach right.
Maybe that's what it's about.
I defer to you and yourknowledge, which is when the
industry was less competitive.
Maybe a hierarchical approachgave you scale.
(29:06):
Today, if you're seeing yourmargins decline, maybe it's time
to reorganize and do specialforces, where a small team can
collaborate, to use specialforces.
Where a small team cancollaborate, it can certainly
collaborate on a name right, aname times 100.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Well, in effect, you're right.
I like the special forcesanalogy.
The rangers go into a communityand live there.
They fix a specific problem.
I don't know that we havefix-it sales support.
(29:44):
I often talk about compensationprograms with equipment salesmen
anybody who sells saying I'mgoing to give you a number of
customers and I expect 100%retention.
So, everybody, I give youJanuary 1st.
I want to have as a customer,january 1st of next year, and if
(30:04):
any of you lose a customer I'mgoing to hurt you.
It'll be noticeable financially.
If you lose too many, you don'thave a job.
Very simple there was agentleman up in Canada, in
Vancouver, one of the largestcar dealerships, and he had a
standard rule the lowestperforming salesman every month
(30:26):
lost their job.
Very simple, that was how helit a fire under everybody's
bottom, under everybody's bottom.
I don't want to have to havepeople working with me that need
a fire under their bottom toget motivated.
I want them to come to memotivated.
I want them to come to me withsome goal, curiosity,
(30:49):
performance, excellence of theirown.
If you don't come to memotivated, I can't give it to
you.
I can sure as hell demotivateyou, but I cannot motivate you.
Culture at Finning a Caterpillardealer I guess they're the
largest in the world now.
That I worked with for a whileback in the 70s we had 12 to 18
(31:10):
people that we would have comein over the summer before they
graduated undergraduate ormaster's, postgraduate, and the
youngest manager, which I was atthat time, was the one that had
to lead them.
And the first month that theycame I would put them in the
warehouse in the most manual,grunchy job you could imagine
(31:31):
putting parts away, pickingparts, packing parts, unloading
trucks and I'd lose about athird of them.
It's hard work, it's sweatywork.
It's not what they wanted.
The ones that stayed, werotated them through different
functions in product support.
We offered them a job when theygraduated.
And those that came back, weput them on an 18-month training
(31:53):
program.
So, like you're seeing, withthe current situation with the
national transportationstructure in America, faa, we
don't have enough air trafficcontrollers, we didn't have
enough salesmen, market coverage, so there's a lead time.
There's a period in time beforethis creates and gets traction.
(32:18):
So the company was smart enough.
They were prepared to waitthree to five years.
Nothing short term, it's a longterm gig this.
But after three to five yearswe had 53 stores.
When I was there, every branchmanager, every parts manager,
every service manager, mostsalesmen, most of the executives
, all came into the company thatway.
(32:39):
Talk about culture, you can'tbreak that one up.
It's a band of brothers.
It's who you're going to go inthe boat with.
You know and that also was in agap.
We didn't have the data thatwe've got today.
That also was in a gap.
We didn't have the data thatwe've got today.
We had to rely on people andthe little black book that is in
(33:02):
my back pocket and it's notshareable.
Today, I can share everythingand data is fluid.
It's all over the place.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
So your three clicks world?
How does that work?
Great question.
So I want to just transitionoff one of your points and then
answer your question.
If you go.
I I can't say I read a lot ofMunger because he's you know, I
see clips here and there and itjust resonates with me is sort
of very distilled wisdom, orBuffett, and so, as I understand
(33:40):
it, munger and Buffett wouldtalk a lot about incentives.
You know, follow the incentives.
And I think you know Mungerwould say it's like the
strongest law of business.
And they spoke of.
Munger spoke of a companycalled Les Schwab Tire right.
Yep, of Munger spoke of acompany called Les Schwab Tire
(34:00):
right.
It used to be closer to you thanme and as I understand in so
many words, the tire business isjust a ruthless, largely OEM
controlled business.
And somehow Les Schwab eked outa really profitable, handsome
business and it was a bigbusiness, I'm guessing north of
a billion dollars at the time,and the notion was incentives.
(34:22):
So the management calledspecial forces was at the branch
that was quote, unquote, theprofit center and there was a
lot of because of the teamparticipated in profits.
It weeded out a lot of sort ofprocesses and controls so they
didn't have to gum them up withadvanced risk management,
(34:46):
because if I stole then I wasdipping into your bonus, and so
there was a lot of verysimplistic approaches to life
that were arguably better thanfancy systems that controlled it
, and I think it's worthconsidering for companies to go
back to a branch level view.
You can only consolidate, merge, integrate so much and take
(35:10):
costs out.
By the way, that's extremelyhard and risky.
It's simplistic in apresentation, very, very hard to
do.
So three clicks.
A lot of fancy reports are verydifficult for people in the
field to access.
By example, they're told todrive their market share up, but
(35:34):
they're not giving the list ofnames that sum up to a market
share percentage.
If they get market share, it'sacross their territory.
It may not be down at thesalesperson level or the store
level or county level.
So one view is we provide ageographic view of where your
customers reside and within it,who's your best, your next best,
et cetera, in three clicks.
(35:55):
We're also linking what we callplaybooks.
It's the first, second andthird action to save them time.
Another view would be aninteractive market share report.
So I'm a salesperson, I'm theCEO of my territory.
Let's say it's Oahu and myterritory is Oahu.
I'm the CEO of the Oahuterritory I'm sure the CEO would
(36:19):
appreciate that and I canactually click on the
Caterpillar line and see whobought Caterpillar.
And click at the number theKomatsu line and see who bought
it.
I can look at maybe there's anunderperforming dealer and I can
look at their best customers.
So I can do a high value.
You know sales proposition.
(36:41):
So we present maps, graphs,tables, all where it's with
dimensionality you can click,click, click.
Now this technology exists,right, again, we're not
magicians.
What we're doing is applying apoint of view on the data.
I believe in theproportionality of the data.
(37:01):
Not all data is equal.
Look at the 10%, look at the20%.
That does 80.
And we're giving them anaccessible view to the data.
Some would argue biased.
Good luck.
One of our clients has 32,000customers.
What are you going to do?
Talk about all 32,000?
A lot easier to talk about3,200.
(37:23):
And by salesperson it's 100.
And that's the great unifier.
So we provide multiple visualcues, or we call it visual
filtering.
So you can say I want to clickon my best customer, who's an
excavation contractor, whobought a wheel loader, and I
want to look at where they alsoown cat as well as Komatsu right
(37:44):
, and you can zero in where thatmarket intelligence is in the
salesperson's hand Today.
It's not, they can't get it.
It's in a point of sale system.
It will spit out transactions.
It's not in the CRM, becausethe management has gummed up CRM
to the point that I can't writeyour birthday in there, ron,
(38:07):
which is the black book.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Right away.
You have created a differential.
Almost every salesman in theequipment world is only talking
to people that have brands thattheir company represents.
If the company, the customer,does not have a machine in a
brand that I represent, it's notin my list.
So I drive by all of thesecustomers and I'm dependent on
(38:40):
my equipment salesman to give meenough machines for my parts
and service business to make memoney.
And that's the road.
It's become very expensive tobe in the capital goods business
mining, forestry.
Look at the blasted price ofequipment.
(39:03):
It's just to give you a bit ofan idea of the dinosaur, and
when I started it, a D8 wasunder 100,000 bucks.
I mean, my Lord, lord, thingshave changed, so I have a
territory.
Are you assigning customers toa salesman, or do you recommend
(39:28):
doing that?
Or do you give them a geographyand say here's a customer
customers, or here's customersin that geography, go find the
ones that will make up the 8020?
Speaker 2 (39:36):
ones that'll make up the 80-20?
It's a good question.
I have to think it through.
We principally follow.
We try to be the weighingmachine right.
So as I've gotten older, I'vecertainly gotten less
opinionated, because I knowthere's more ways to fail.
Right, and I'm not seeking tobe right, I'm seeking to help
you today and it's like exercise, right, if you, I remember, you
(40:01):
know I ran one marathon.
I will not run another one.
But if you said to me great,you run in 10 minute miles, okay
, let's get to nine, okay,you're not trying to turn me
into an Olympic runner overnight.
So we graft, we bolt onto theirexisting behaviors and try to
(40:22):
level set with a data set thatthe salesperson can share with
their sales manager, call it theboss and agree on the state of
the market.
Now when we fuse in other data.
So generally my experience isit's customers by territory.
But we bring in constructionspending data, we bring in other
(40:42):
external data.
So now there is some connection, which is if a salesperson has
his territory has a dearth ofconstruction spending, it's
abundant.
When you can see the layers andsay bad market, good customers,
(41:05):
this other territory is growingand from the customer's point of
view salesperson go talk to Ron, the GC, on a job, right at the
bidding stage and say what areyour needs, what payment terms,
what kind of uptime, what's theschedule of the project.
You know I'll script for youprobably what you want to hear.
I'll script for you to helpingyou deliver your project on time
(41:26):
and on budget so you can makemoney right and you can pay me
based on performance, whetherI'm selling you equipment or
running you equipment or keepingit.
You know up and running.
So when we link together thecustomer with the jobs that
they're on, with the geographies, with the competitive
marketplace, you can now have amore robust, you can design the
(41:50):
customer experience truly aroundthem.
It's not that hard.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
I suspect one of the obstacles that you have is
you're bringing fresh thinkingto a marketplace that is used to
old-fashioned thinking, and Idon't mean to insult anybody
with that, but that's kind ofthe way it is.
You must receive unbelievableresistance from people oh,
(42:17):
that'll never work here.
I don't have that data, mypeople don't.
That's not the kind of folksthat I have working with me.
Am I getting it right?
Speaker 2 (42:29):
You are.
I'll break it down, though,because you just brought back
something fresh for me.
There is a company it'sactually not in this industry.
They rent and buy equipment,and the CEO was probably a lot
(42:51):
like the younger version of me.
He wanted to do above andbeyond, and he thinks it's his
job to provide this solution.
He's got business intelligence,he's got the data warehouse,
he's got the CRM, and he isblocking the head of sales from
getting the data he needs to dowhat the CEO wants.
(43:12):
The CEO wants to.
He's got people doing fourquotes and people doing 15s.
He knows if he can print thequotes of the fours to the 15th,
ebitda will increase from I'mgoing to make up a number 50 to
60 million.
I'm changing those numbers alittle bit, but just that
increment.
(43:33):
If he gets his fours to 15s,per month, ebitda jumps by 20%.
It's not trivial, and so it'sinternal fighting amongst
themselves.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
Yeah, but what you do there, I agree with the premise
completely.
Well, once I get everybody at15, once I get everybody at 15,
I've run into the ceiling.
There's a capacity issue,that's fair, yeah.
(44:06):
And you know, in the old dayswhat we used to do is you get a
salesman, he starts gettingsuccessful, and you take some
customers away, give it tosomebody else, and now you've
taken your good guy and you'vehurt him, demotivated him and
you've given the customers thenames a rookie where they were
really comfortable with George,with no thinking about or no
(44:33):
respect for what the customerwants.
And that's a common occurrencein every damn market.
So let's shift gears a littlebit and talk about data and
specifically talk about themodel that Amazon uses where
(44:55):
they identified a niche booksthat didn't satisfy big readers,
satisfied casual readers.
The casual reader is going toread the stuff that bestsellers,
that's it.
The real reader wants a broaderview.
(45:19):
So I read three, four or fivedepending, used to be more a
month books.
I'd go to a bookstore, I'd wantto buy the book.
They never had it.
I had to wait.
So I had to pay for the bookand I had to pay for the freight
to bring it in and I had towait.
Here comes Amazon, here comesBezos, and he says you know, I'm
(45:42):
going to get the fast movingbooks and I'm going to offer
them at a lower price.
I'm going to get thefast-moving books and I'm going
to offer them at a lower priceand I'm going to get in on a
price point.
And my argument in selling isthat price is only important
when every other element of thetransaction is the same.
And because you're on the deal,nick, it's never the same.
Nobody else is Nick.
(46:03):
But Amazon went forward, gotsuccessful, and then all of a
sudden they said well, we'regoing to start a club.
Going back to the AmericanAirlines, crandall, when he was
chairman, got a frequent flyerprogram going.
So Bezos said well, see, that'sa good idea.
And there's many other examples.
And he said I'm going to have aprime membership, I'm going to
(46:28):
charge you something annuallyand because of that I'm not
going to charge you for books,for freight.
So you had to do a littlecalculation in your head and
said OK, it's 90 bucks a year.
I buy 100 bucks a year.
If it's a book on freight, I'mmaking money.
Making money, I'll pay the 90bucks.
And that's what he did, andthat thing's up to about 150,
(46:48):
160, but what he did at the sametime was broaden the offering.
Yep, why don't we do that withequipment salesmen, with parts
salesmen, with service salesmen?
Speaker 2 (47:00):
we should first but what do you think?
Speaker 1 (47:03):
standing in the way well, I'm piecing together.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
I, by the way, I love I'm going to say following you
because your mind is is advancedand I'm bright, so I'm going to
replay some things that wasgoing through my head as you
were talking.
So I remember at one point inmy career, finally understanding
, quote unquote, the long tailand meaning what's not in the
(47:30):
bell curve Right and the bus oncurve Correct.
And I also remember hearing anepisode on Bezos where Saul
Price tell you, proving I'm avillage idiot.
Bezos or Saul Price to tell youproving I'm a village idiot.
I went to a school that wasendowed by Saul Price, but I
didn't know that he was at Price, costco or Price forget the
(47:54):
name of his original company,the predated Costco Yep, he was
a big believer in sharing hisknowledge.
As I understand it, um, and hehad shared with brought with
Bezos I might be skipping oneperson, so forgive me, but he
had shared with Bezos is thenotion of always low prices but
(48:15):
sell a membership and capturethe, you know, raise your gross
margin dollars and don't worry.
You know, worry less about thegross margin on transactions.
So, to my knowledge, costcotoday is 12% markup, as I
understand it, give or take.
I think your idea is brilliantand I think it's.
(48:38):
I don't know why somebodywouldn't do it.
They're actually doing it wrong, but they're not.
That's perfect, thank you.
They're not getting the creditfor it and they're leaking money
all over with not having a teamthat operates as one.
So they overspend on marketing.
(49:00):
You go back to that examplewhere 100% of the marketing
capital was spent on call it thelong tail, and where they spent
50 in sgna every.
They had a tax and every dollarspent on marketing to pay the
marketing department.
None of that marketing went tohelp the sales people.
(49:20):
So break, that's one like hugeturd of trust, you know, or
broken trust, sitting in theroom.
They have salespeople undersupported by marketing dollars,
right, relationship marketingdollars.
You have departments with callit animosity.
(49:41):
You have the stupidity ofhanding out promotional products
, right, because that's whatever I'm going to call it, me
too thinking so.
They could easily save thosenickels and dimes everywhere by
having a sort of a.
You know, bezos had a long tailplan Save those nickels and
dimes that they're hemorrhaging,consolidate thatidate that,
(50:05):
take a unified view of thecustomer.
It means sales is not fightingwith marketing, and that's
probably a terrible word.
What I've seen mostly is apathy.
I'm not going to help you.
Go, screw yourself.
Salesperson or a salesperson,they can't talk to marketing
because they've been shut downfor so long.
Not my job, they could do it.
(50:25):
It's just they got a riflethrough the brain.
Damage In marketing.
If I could take it one stepfurther, marketing should really
serve the salesperson right InB2B sales, if 80% of the sales
come from 20% of the salespeople.
Marketing should work for sales.
Go serve them.
Speaker 1 (50:44):
What's interesting is the statement there's no new
business.
Everything you sell today isnew business, to whomever it is,
and marketing is misunderstood.
And your comment aboutmarketing dollars and where
they're going.
Marketing is everything andanything that influences a
(51:07):
customer to buy.
The most important piece ofthat puzzle is the person, the
sales person whether it's on thephone or face-to-face or on the
internet, that gets the sale.
One of the things that wasreally interesting about 15, 20
years ago, when XML came in andreplaced HTML, I knew how long
(51:36):
everybody was on the screenwhere the cursor went, how long
it stuck in every place, I knewwhether they looked at the price
, I knew whether they checkedavailability and I knew whether
they placed an order.
What blew people's minds wasthe next morning I would call
you up and say hey, nick, Inoticed last night you were
looking to get a maintenancedone on that such and such
(51:58):
machine a 500-hour service.
Did you find somebody to do itfor you?
And now the customer on theother end is saying son of a gun
, what the heck does he knowabout me?
But that's the beginning of howcan I help you?
Yeah well said, I don't knowthat you have heard me do it
(52:21):
necessarily, but for the lastseveral years, anytime anybody
asks me for something, I say yes.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
I've heard you.
You said yes to me and you're agift.
Speaker 1 (52:34):
Yeah, and it confuses the hell out of people.
Now, that's not saying I'mgoing to say yes to what you
asked for.
I might change the context.
I might make it something thatI can say yes for.
I might change the context, Imight make it something that I
can say yes for.
But the next one that'sabsolutely more important from
(52:58):
my perspective every client I'vehad is is there anything else I
can do for you?
Or I'd go into clients and I'dsay what product are you having
the most difficulty with thesedays?
And oh, 20, 30 years ago, therewas a real shortage of mining
truck tires.
You couldn't get a tire for ayear or two.
Trucks were being sold and thetires are expensive.
(53:19):
The trucks are anywhere from 30million to 100 million and you
couldn't get tires.
And that's how you move productout of a mine.
How the hell do you deal withthat?
So there's so many avenues inthis where data is critical,
(53:41):
where bringing the data to thepeople who need it is absolutely
necessary.
It's not happening.
Having strategic thinking thatpositions a company to achieve
specific goals, having a purpose, is missing.
(54:03):
Business schools in the last 15, 20 years are regurgitating the
same thing Harvard, yale andDartmouth and the big schools
that for years drove therankings aren't even in the top
10 anymore because they've beencontinuing to put out the same
problem, which everybody nowunderstands doesn't fit this
world anymore.
The world is changing sorapidly Telematics, sensors,
(54:28):
computers, minis, cell phones,all this stuff and here comes
artificial intelligence.
We are not ready for this.
Even younger people aren't upto speed with it.
Nick, I don't want to beat thisthing up, but I think we've
given it a bit of a shot.
I'd like to do another chapteron this in the next couple of
(54:50):
three weeks.
I would be thrilled, and if youever want to.
Speaker 2 (54:53):
I would love your feedback, right, I mean?
We're we're not seeking to beright, we're.
We're truly seeking to helppeople make money and if they
make money, they will livebetter lives.
It's not about greed what Imake, I plan on giving away.
I'm not looking for a biggerhouse, I don't own a boat.
(55:17):
You know blah, blah, blah butwould love to show it to you and
get your feedback and adapt,and I said it to you earlier
today.
There's a few people and I'msure there's more.
It's just who's on my mind you,steve Clegg, there's others
that I believe we can helppeople make money.
(55:39):
Get frankly, have more fun, getout of the brain damage, get
out of hating each other andwhose fault and, frankly,
getting surprised is no fun.
Oh don't, don't surprise me,babe and there's a lot of you
know, I bet was in an in when,when I was at volvo rents, we we
franchised in north america, ineurope we didn't, it was
(56:02):
through dealer distribution andI don't know if you're how, if
you, franchising attracts a fairamount of scoundrels, sort of
get rich quick concepts.
You know, buy my franchisebecause you know and you'll make
a zillion dollars.
There's a lot of vendorspreying on dealers and rental
(56:26):
companies with what I call hopesand dreams and like any hope or
dream, there's usually likenine truths and one lie.
But good luck figuring outwhich one's the lie, because
it's like a drop, it's going tomake you sick, it's the shell
game.
(56:49):
It's aftop, it's the show game,it's, it's f-ed up and so you
got power, bi data warehouses,rental analysis system, dealer
business systems, you know crm,erp, nps, subscription data,
octowazoo, and it's like, let mejust, let me just just grab
onto you like a parasite and getmy bite Right, let me.
I'm going to say they don'treally have a lot of reverence
(57:10):
for the host, right?
Speaker 1 (57:15):
I think that's probably a perfect place to stop
Pick it up as the next chapter.
So, Nick, thank you so much.
Thank you Everybody listening.
Thank you for hanging aroundand listening to what Nick has
to say.
There's a lot of gold in therefor those of you that are
prepared to look for it.
So, thank you, and I'll lookforward to seeing you on our
(57:38):
next Candid Conversation.
Mahalo.
Aloha and welcome to our candid conversation.
Today we're joined by NickMaverick of Built Data.
Nick has a very unique view onselling that is much more
professional, much moreanalytical, much more pointed
(00:26):
than the good old boy drivingaround in a truck saying hello
to people.
So, with that as theintroduction, I'd like to have
Nick spend some time explainingto us what built data does.
So, Nick, the ball's in yourcourt, my friend.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Well, ron, thank you for A the time with you, B being
a blessing and your world ofgood and the opportunity to
learn from you and your team andall the contributors.
It's the single best learningmechanism, I believe, not only
for the industry but even folksoutside of the industry.
So, thank you, you're welcomeand I wish I lived in a home who
(01:07):
is Nick Magbrick.
Well, I am a student of life andthe industry and, to just alter
some of the narrative, I'velearned so much from listening
to the field and I was probablyin my early thirties.
(01:28):
I've learned so much fromlistening to the field and I was
probably in my early 30s and Ithought I was a good listener.
I was certainly raised to behumble and there was a sales guy
, his name's Keith, and when Iworked at Volvo Rents and he
said you don't listen.
And he was right.
It's the listening when peoplesay nothing.
And the behavioral side of mostof my career has been as a
(01:52):
generalist.
But the longest length of mycareer was in marketing,
supporting sales forces in theconstruction equipment rental
industry and of latelydealerships, construction
equipment dealerships and earlyin my career I learned to count
to 10.
And the notion is theexpression of disproportionate
(02:15):
data and, just to sum it up,would be called the 80-20 rule
and it doesn't mean data 20% ofthe customers do 80% of your
business.
It means that it just meanslopsided and pay attention to
the proportions.
So built data was formed for afew reasons.
One is to serve the field, toserve sales persons as a
(02:39):
behavioral tool to put valuablemarket intel, whether it's
internal or external, at theirfingertips in three clicks.
And the second reason was toprovide a direct connection to
management so they could link,or they should be called field
support, where field support andsalespersons can speak the same
(03:02):
language about the customer.
So provide them an equal dataset that can either be observed
centrally and all the way at thefield, where they can see, have
a unified view of the customer.
It's actually one of your recentblog posts I think it might
have been today or yesterdaytalking about how to treat the
(03:23):
customer with love, and the bestdealerships and the highest
performing rental operationsspoil their VIP customers and
dealerships have an advantagethat in many instances, I think,
is maybe they're not fullyaware of their strengths, which
(03:45):
is local ownership, and, yes,some dealerships are not locally
owned.
However, the notion of, as Iunderstand it, as the industry
was born and dealers and rentalcompanies really smothered their
best customers with a betterunderstanding of their needs so
(04:05):
they could do their job, andwhen you pay attention to what
you do, well, try to do more ofit.
As opposed to many companiesthat I talked to today, would
say they have too much data,everything's shouting at them,
their CRM, their point of sale,their ERP could be their
(04:28):
e-commerce systems or onlinesystems, and they have so much
data.
So they went from a dearth ofdata to now so much data that
they can't distill signal fromnoise.
So I hope that gives you alittle bit of a background of
what we do.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
I think that's really valid.
I hope that gives you a littlebit of a background of what we
do.
I think that's really valid.
You know there's a series ofthings that are true about
business to business and I guessthe fundamental point is
everybody looks at these labelsDIY, dafy, all this stuff, diy,
(05:03):
dafy, all this stuff.
And Steve Clegg, who I knowyou've known and speak to,
reverts everything back to twopeople a buyer and a seller.
Right, and it's about thetransaction and the perpetuation
(05:30):
or the continuation of thattransaction stream is a function
of the relationship and toomany salesmen, particularly in
the capital goods arena, go byand you know how are things
today.
Rarely do they have a purposefor the call.
Rarely do they send minutesback to the customer.
(05:51):
Rarely do they make commitmentswith the customer at each call
of what they're going to do next.
It's much more a PR thing and Ithink you've related to that in
many ways.
Salesmen are very important.
It's a very misunderstood jobfunction.
Everybody thinks it's PR andplaying golf and going to lunch
(06:16):
and hanging around bars at night.
It's none of that.
It's hard work if you're goingto be successful, no doubt.
How do you help salesmen becomemore successful?
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Well, I want to go back to Steve Clegg.
I've had the blessing ofmeeting Steve through you and
Steve, when you and I werespeaking earlier today off the
charts sort of intelligence andunderstanding similar to you I
know you don't like hearing thatand Steve, very simply, he
(06:54):
distilled complexity tosimplicity, just like you did,
and what I've heard Steve say,I've heard you say on multiple
occasions which is about thetransaction, and the transaction
is the behavior.
It's just a photograph of apoint in time, of the behavior,
and Steve and you, who'vecollaborated, look at that
(07:15):
transaction to come up with veryaccurate forecasts.
In the industry.
We don't do that, by the way,and I have enough knowledge of
the space, though, to understandwhat it takes to do it well,
and one of the challenges is theindustry is undergoing a lot of
(07:37):
change, and I shouldn't saythat the water has been getting
hotter over a long period oftime and it's almost
unnoticeable.
And it's new market entrance,whether it's called overseas
iron, it's the shift of rentalor the profound growth of rental
(08:02):
.
The profound growth of rental.
I was referencing a presentationearlier today it was a great
one given by Tom Doyle and BradLull at ConExpo.
It was actually at AEMP thatpreceded this recent, this
couple of years ago, conexpo,and I was referencing it because
I was writing some work forBuilt Data about the growth of
(08:24):
rental and when you look atasset classes and earth moving
in that presentation was quotedat 35% of all heavy equipment is
rented For telehandlers.
(08:50):
I want to say just from memoryit was north of 65, could have
been 75%.
And what's missing in thatconversation is the customer.
And there's a ton of price warsgoing on.
There's conflict between, callit, the OEMs overproducing or
underproducing, the dealer whothey're leaning on to sell
specific things, the dealer whothey're leaning on to sell
specific things, the rentalindustries, which the big three
have tremendous market power andtheir own strengths, and for my
(09:17):
belief is that there's asimpler path.
If I woke up at any one ofthose companies, I would be
somewhat terrified because theenvironment is changing so
quickly.
I think what's really missingis a customer-centric view that
(09:39):
understands, of course, helpingthat person get their job done.
It's not only the margin on therental transaction, it could be
everything else that helps getthe job done Parts and service,
uptime, total cost of ownership,predictable costs for the
contractor so they can make aprofit on their job instead of
(10:00):
this downward spiral.
So if we, if we go back to SteveClegg and forecasting, is what
is the behavioral component?
To link a killer forecast tothe sales manager who's
scripting to a goal for theenterprise and to the
(10:21):
salesperson, who in manyinstances is forced to lie to
their boss and lie by omission,right, that doesn't make you a
fraud, it means you're sort ofkeeping your job and that so
that we principally link, link agoal you can call that a
(10:43):
forecast and transport thatinformation to the salesperson
so they can see the expressionof the 80-20 rule in their data
and giving them a direct linkageso the central office and the
salesperson can operate from thesame sheet of music.
There's also key market intel.
(11:04):
I don't know if you ever readtom riley's book.
Value-added selling, yeah, butwe should be selling value,
right.
I mean, we do a lot of things.
Our equipment rental companiesand dealers do a lot of things
that are actually extremelydifficult delivering uh
equipment on time, billing,accuracy, you know, we can sort
of dumb it down and say, well,how hard is it?
It's hard.
Or how hard can it be?
(11:32):
It's extremely hard.
Prompt pickup and delivery,keeping those machines at uptime
and reporting back to thatcustomer how they're serving
them to increase theirprofitability.
I don't think we do a good jobof that.
So being able to translate theforecast to something that the
salesperson can focus on andknow that they have the back of
their enterprise to deliver onthose promises of uptime, call
it value added, we believeincreases profitability.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
It's a pretty straightforward world if you
really get down to it world ifyou really get down to it.
What's problematic from myperspective is the world around
us.
The commercial world around usis so far ahead of us it is
embarrassing.
You go into a drugstore.
(12:18):
Have you been a customer?
Put your phone number in yeah,so I know everything about you.
I know also what credit cardyou use.
I have signature pads all overthe place.
I have chip payment with acredit card, and how many
(12:41):
dealers do that?
How many dealers have asignature pad?
Whether it's rental or sale, Idon't care, the customer sees
things spectrum, elon Musk'sworld of telematics and
(13:10):
low-grade or low-levelsatellites all of these things
and we don't do any of that.
What Steve is a maniac about,as am I.
Harvard wrote a definitive book, probably 20, 30 years ago now,
called the Service Profit Chain.
That definitively proved thatthe single most important metric
(13:33):
for any business that wants tobe successful is customer
retention.
And Steve's a maniac about that.
He measures customer retention,but he doesn't look at
financial data, he just looks attransactions.
Yeah, super smart world thatwe're struggling, transitioning
(14:04):
to a stakeholder world from ashareholder world.
What I've been calling for 20years that we put profits over
people, customer services hasgone down, and I had a great
chat yesterday with another ofour contributors, david Griffith
, who's the chairman of ModernEquipment, and he gave me one
(14:25):
that I've stolen from him.
We put in greed over ourgrandchildren.
In other words, everything wedo is short term.
So the OEM, as you said,overproduces or underproduces
but they have a buffer at thedealer level.
If they overproduce they givespecial flooring so the OEM
(14:45):
dealer buys the equipment.
Rental is burst overflowbusiness and it's been a
geographic limit in NorthAmerica versus Europe and Asia.
The European percentage ofmachine hours in rental is close
(15:06):
to double what it is in theUnited States and Japan's in the
same category and we reallyhaven't adapted the number of
OEM dealers that are good atrental.
You did that with Volvo,caterpillar did it with Cat
Rents.
There's struggles to do thatbut the big three, like you say,
united and Sunbelt et cetera,those folks have it down to an
(15:30):
art form and they don't have thesame cost structure, they don't
have the same overheadstructure that an OEM dealer
does.
Yeah they have market power?
They clearly do, and the marketpower allows them to be very
powerful.
When it's purchasing time, hugeYep.
But they don't provide anycustomer service.
(15:53):
They just provide a machine Yep.
When the machine goes out, itworks.
If it doesn't, they replace itreal quick.
Some of the old-fashionedrental houses used to put an
operator in the chair, but mostof those have gone.
Now it's typically small firmsthat do that as a means of
getting market share.
But go back to that salesmanagain.
(16:16):
He's driving around in hisvehicle.
Who does he go see?
Why does he go see them?
How do they manage their time?
Because that's the killer for asalesman, isn't it?
How do they make their timemost cost effective?
How do they get the most salesdollars per minute that they can
(16:37):
possibly do it?
And I think that built datagives them tools.
That allows them.
They don't necessarily do it,but it allows them to make very
powerful decisions and effectivedecisions on who they go see
next and what they do with them.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Yeah, and it's so fun to learn.
I keep thinking at some point,oh, I feel like I'm back in my
freshman year.
I don't know if it's highschool or college, but behavior
is one of the hardest things todo.
Or culture, right, pick yourword is one of the hardest
things to pull off in business.
(17:12):
And I find that getting, if Ican say, best customer, and what
does that mean?
Well, let's look at the segmentthat does 10.
Let's look at deciles, let'slook at the top 10% of your
customers and see theircontribution, cool.
Just having that common languagebetween if I'm the salesperson,
(17:34):
you're my sales manager oryou're the CEO, and then you're
talking to your OEM, just havingthat common linkage removes
layers of sort of mistrust,antagonism et cetera.
That breaks companies in half.
And you've talked about theslow bleed before.
I've had a small purview intothat world, which is?
(17:57):
You talked about parts coverageat one point, at one point, and
you would quote a statistic, ifI remember it was one OEM had
its part spent, business haddeclined from 50% to 25.
And I want to say to 18, youknow the number's better than I
do.
And there's a lot of slowbleeding.
(18:20):
And I recently worked with adealer, with meeting, and I
recently worked with a dealerwith I'm going to round the
numbers 10% of their customersdid about 80% of their business
and 100% of their marketingcapital went to the 80% of the
customers doing 20% of thebusiness.
And it gets better um 60 orabout 50, 60 percent of the
(18:50):
entirety mark marketing budgetwent to sgna to spend the other
50.
It's nuts.
And so if you're in a company,um, I'm gonna say it's, it was,
it's lost and it's lost by um.
It forgot what it was good at,it fought, forgot what it was
focused, you know, focused onwhich is serving a small group
(19:11):
of customers and spoiling theheck out of them.
And they're just.
It's a land of confusion and ithas a real human expense and
it's not only leads to lowermargins and you know I'm going
to say it breaks families inhalf.
You know, at the end of the day, a lack of prosperity has huge
(19:35):
downstream, negative you knownegative implications for
society.
And it just starts with acompany they can't get their
bonus, they don't get a raise.
It just starts with a companythey can't get their bonus, they
don't get a raise.
If I can shift into the positive, we have a client where we, by
the way, we're not magicians Idon't want to oversell anything.
(19:58):
We do dirty work, we dig fordata.
Right, you can call it what youwant.
I've done my fair share of it.
It is not fancy.
Sometimes it means Ron Sleewith one E, ron Slee with two
E's, r Slee, and it meansfinding those Ron Slee's in the
three different data sets.
It sucks, but it gives thecompany a unified view of what
(20:22):
you're doing.
So we had one one of our dealerclients recently used this
consolidated data set that theirpeople can get two and three
clicks and their salespeoplethey're planning the year and
they set sales goal and they usebuilt data to retrieve the
information.
That's not that big of a dealin itself.
Now they have a behavioralcomponent where they can track
(20:44):
their progress against the coal.
Even better.
They can actually have themarket intel so they can do
value-added selling to theircustomers and prospects and do
territory management moreeffectively.
It just strips out a lot of thebrain damage from running
around to grift for business.
(21:05):
So we are not magicians.
It's pretty simple.
It's linking the behavior witha unified data set.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
One of the things that's problematic is the
quality of the data.
There's many system providers,erps, or whatever we want to
call them, and use Salesforce asan example.
(21:34):
They have a profile for acustomer Salesforce I'm going to
call it an add-on piece ofsoftware to a business system.
The business system also has aprofile.
Those profiles are not the same.
The two systems, salesforce'sand whoever the dealer
(21:57):
management system is, let mecall those DMSs they don't talk
to each other, or if they do,it's one way.
So now I've got two differentprofiles and I want to get a
report.
So here comes built data.
Okay, nick, where do I go?
Do I go to Salesforce?
Do I go to my DMS, or do I haveto do both and consolidate them
(22:21):
?
And what are you going to do tohelp me with that?
That's part of the dirty workthat you have to do.
Correct, yeah, and on top ofthat, I always said whoever's
(22:42):
closest to the customer wins.
I've also said that as asalesperson, depending on my
geography, I can only deal witha finite number of customers.
Let me just say, arbitrarily,100.
Because I have to drive and oneof the things that we have in
sales management is amisunderstanding of drive time.
(23:05):
I had a fellow up in Ottawa awhole Ottawa, it's across the
Ottawa River up in Quebec,canada, and he did 5,000 miles a
year in his truck.
At 50 miles an hour that's1,000 hours.
So you want to work through2,000 hours in a year.
(23:26):
50% of the time you're sittingin your and this is before cell
phones A, b, it was in an areathat there wasn't cell phone
service.
There will be today withStarlink and things like that,
but this is a while back.
I don't know how many peoplethink that way.
You mentioned I've got anexecutive.
(23:48):
They drive and create astrategy for the company.
The strategy is passed down andtranslated to a bunch of
different departments and thosedepartments make a strategy for
the department and thosedepartments make a strategy for
the department.
(24:11):
No-transcript.
And the illustration you usedwas Caterpillar's parts market
share when I started was 83% in1970, actually 1965.
And I'm talking at a conferencein Mississippi in the early
(24:34):
2000s and the gentleman incharge of and say I know this
isn't a popular question, butwould you mind telling me what
your parts market share is?
And without a hesitation hesaid 38.3% and I thanked him and
let's just arbitrarily say thatwas the year 2000.
So in the 35 years 1965 to 2000, they went from 83% to 38%.
(24:59):
Okay, there's a chapter.
Next chapter is consolidationof dealers.
There's fewer of them today,less of them.
They're bigger by nature.
A bigger organization loses apersonal touch.
Culture, like you indicated, isextremely important.
(25:21):
I always ask groups what do youdo?
And most people can tell youhow do you do it.
Not everybody they want to talkabout poorly or excellent or
whatever the hell.
The real question is why do youdo it?
(25:42):
And I want people to want to doit because they care for and
want to serve other people and aservant's heart is an important
characteristic.
But a lot of people would noteven want to go there.
But that's what it's about.
I need to make you feel goodabout the relationship you have
(26:04):
with me, not what you're buyingfrom me, but me, that I look
after all your needs and wants.
Whenever there's a problem, I'mhere.
It doesn't matter what it is,I'm there, I fix it, and tools
like built data allow me tomaximize that thousand hours if
I'm up in the whole Ottawa areain front of the customer.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Yeah, do you mind if I build on one of your points?
Sure, certainly you mentioned acustomer and the customer has a
name, right?
So when you talk market shareright, that's a bunch of names
(26:49):
added up to market share andit's not that hard.
And that's what's so screwyabout this is, when I look at a
salesperson with a $25 to $50million business, they have a
hundred customers that will do80% of their business.
And well, you could say, well,it's a hundred.
(27:10):
Well, can I partner with you ifI'm in marketing and you're the
salesperson?
Can we figure out what it takesto serve Ron?
Right, and it's one customer?
If I deal with this, even in myown company and how we go to
market, which is, if we don'treally know your name, we
shouldn't be talking, weshouldn't be marketing to you,
(27:30):
we really shouldn't.
If we can't do our homeworkbefore we come in, um, we, we
shouldn't be doing right at all.
And so market share has a name.
It's the law.
I call it the law of smallnumbers, right, and it's the law
of small numbers in threeclicks, and if you don't know
those 100 names, then any roadwill get you there, as the
(27:54):
saying goes.
And I don't know if you, I knowyou're like a student of Charlie
Munger, but he gave a killerspeech.
A lot of it it's about life, butthe speech was he was asked to
speak, I believe, to Harvardcollege, and I believe his son
was graduating, and the speechwas how to live a life of misery
, and he goes through a fewthings, and if you can't plan
(28:21):
market share by the law of smallnumbers, by the law of names,
you're highly likely to live alife of misery, and a lot of
companies are in this shapetoday.
It's tough.
I mean, you're looking at 10%EBIT margins, you're looking at
supermarket type net incomemargins, and that's with price
(28:44):
increases and layoffs, and it'sa shame.
Good news is, though, it can bereversed, and it can be
reversed if you take a specialforces approach right.
Maybe that's what it's about.
I defer to you and yourknowledge, which is when the
industry was less competitive.
Maybe a hierarchical approachgave you scale.
(29:06):
Today, if you're seeing yourmargins decline, maybe it's time
to reorganize and do specialforces, where a small team can
collaborate, to use specialforces.
Where a small team cancollaborate, it can certainly
collaborate on a name right, aname times 100.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Well, in effect, you're right.
I like the special forcesanalogy.
The rangers go into a communityand live there.
They fix a specific problem.
I don't know that we havefix-it sales support.
(29:44):
I often talk about compensationprograms with equipment salesmen
anybody who sells saying I'mgoing to give you a number of
customers and I expect 100%retention.
So, everybody, I give youJanuary 1st.
I want to have as a customer,january 1st of next year, and if
(30:04):
any of you lose a customer I'mgoing to hurt you.
It'll be noticeable financially.
If you lose too many, you don'thave a job.
Very simple there was agentleman up in Canada, in
Vancouver, one of the largestcar dealerships, and he had a
standard rule the lowestperforming salesman every month
(30:26):
lost their job.
Very simple, that was how helit a fire under everybody's
bottom, under everybody's bottom.
I don't want to have to havepeople working with me that need
a fire under their bottom toget motivated.
I want them to come to memotivated.
I want them to come to me withsome goal, curiosity,
(30:49):
performance, excellence of theirown.
If you don't come to memotivated, I can't give it to
you.
I can sure as hell demotivateyou, but I cannot motivate you.
Culture at Finning a Caterpillardealer I guess they're the
largest in the world now.
That I worked with for a whileback in the 70s we had 12 to 18
(31:10):
people that we would have comein over the summer before they
graduated undergraduate ormaster's, postgraduate, and the
youngest manager, which I was atthat time, was the one that had
to lead them.
And the first month that theycame I would put them in the
warehouse in the most manual,grunchy job you could imagine
(31:31):
putting parts away, pickingparts, packing parts, unloading
trucks and I'd lose about athird of them.
It's hard work, it's sweatywork.
It's not what they wanted.
The ones that stayed, werotated them through different
functions in product support.
We offered them a job when theygraduated.
And those that came back, weput them on an 18-month training
(31:53):
program.
So, like you're seeing, withthe current situation with the
national transportationstructure in America, faa, we
don't have enough air trafficcontrollers, we didn't have
enough salesmen, market coverage, so there's a lead time.
There's a period in time beforethis creates and gets traction.
(32:18):
So the company was smart enough.
They were prepared to waitthree to five years.
Nothing short term, it's a longterm gig this.
But after three to five yearswe had 53 stores.
When I was there, every branchmanager, every parts manager,
every service manager, mostsalesmen, most of the executives
, all came into the company thatway.
(32:39):
Talk about culture, you can'tbreak that one up.
It's a band of brothers.
It's who you're going to go inthe boat with.
You know and that also was in agap.
We didn't have the data thatwe've got today.
That also was in a gap.
We didn't have the data thatwe've got today.
We had to rely on people andthe little black book that is in
(33:02):
my back pocket and it's notshareable.
Today, I can share everythingand data is fluid.
It's all over the place.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
So your three clicks world?
How does that work?
Great question.
So I want to just transitionoff one of your points and then
answer your question.
If you go.
I I can't say I read a lot ofMunger because he's you know, I
see clips here and there and itjust resonates with me is sort
of very distilled wisdom, orBuffett, and so, as I understand
(33:40):
it, munger and Buffett wouldtalk a lot about incentives.
You know, follow the incentives.
And I think you know Mungerwould say it's like the
strongest law of business.
And they spoke of.
Munger spoke of a companycalled Les Schwab Tire right.
Yep, of Munger spoke of acompany called Les Schwab Tire
(34:00):
right.
It used to be closer to you thanme and as I understand in so
many words, the tire business isjust a ruthless, largely OEM
controlled business.
And somehow Les Schwab eked outa really profitable, handsome
business and it was a bigbusiness, I'm guessing north of
a billion dollars at the time,and the notion was incentives.
(34:22):
So the management calledspecial forces was at the branch
that was quote, unquote, theprofit center and there was a
lot of because of the teamparticipated in profits.
It weeded out a lot of sort ofprocesses and controls so they
didn't have to gum them up withadvanced risk management,
(34:46):
because if I stole then I wasdipping into your bonus, and so
there was a lot of verysimplistic approaches to life
that were arguably better thanfancy systems that controlled it
, and I think it's worthconsidering for companies to go
back to a branch level view.
You can only consolidate, merge, integrate so much and take
(35:10):
costs out.
By the way, that's extremelyhard and risky.
It's simplistic in apresentation, very, very hard to
do.
So three clicks.
A lot of fancy reports are verydifficult for people in the
field to access.
By example, they're told todrive their market share up, but
(35:34):
they're not giving the list ofnames that sum up to a market
share percentage.
If they get market share, it'sacross their territory.
It may not be down at thesalesperson level or the store
level or county level.
So one view is we provide ageographic view of where your
customers reside and within it,who's your best, your next best,
et cetera, in three clicks.
(35:55):
We're also linking what we callplaybooks.
It's the first, second andthird action to save them time.
Another view would be aninteractive market share report.
So I'm a salesperson, I'm theCEO of my territory.
Let's say it's Oahu and myterritory is Oahu.
I'm the CEO of the Oahuterritory I'm sure the CEO would
(36:19):
appreciate that and I canactually click on the
Caterpillar line and see whobought Caterpillar.
And click at the number theKomatsu line and see who bought
it.
I can look at maybe there's anunderperforming dealer and I can
look at their best customers.
So I can do a high value.
You know sales proposition.
(36:41):
So we present maps, graphs,tables, all where it's with
dimensionality you can click,click, click.
Now this technology exists,right, again, we're not
magicians.
What we're doing is applying apoint of view on the data.
I believe in theproportionality of the data.
(37:01):
Not all data is equal.
Look at the 10%, look at the20%.
That does 80.
And we're giving them anaccessible view to the data.
Some would argue biased.
Good luck.
One of our clients has 32,000customers.
What are you going to do?
Talk about all 32,000?
A lot easier to talk about3,200.
(37:23):
And by salesperson it's 100.
And that's the great unifier.
So we provide multiple visualcues, or we call it visual
filtering.
So you can say I want to clickon my best customer, who's an
excavation contractor, whobought a wheel loader, and I
want to look at where they alsoown cat as well as Komatsu right
(37:44):
, and you can zero in where thatmarket intelligence is in the
salesperson's hand Today.
It's not, they can't get it.
It's in a point of sale system.
It will spit out transactions.
It's not in the CRM, becausethe management has gummed up CRM
to the point that I can't writeyour birthday in there, ron,
(38:07):
which is the black book.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Right away.
You have created a differential.
Almost every salesman in theequipment world is only talking
to people that have brands thattheir company represents.
If the company, the customer,does not have a machine in a
brand that I represent, it's notin my list.
So I drive by all of thesecustomers and I'm dependent on
(38:40):
my equipment salesman to give meenough machines for my parts
and service business to make memoney.
And that's the road.
It's become very expensive tobe in the capital goods business
mining, forestry.
Look at the blasted price ofequipment.
(39:03):
It's just to give you a bit ofan idea of the dinosaur, and
when I started it, a D8 wasunder 100,000 bucks.
I mean, my Lord, lord, thingshave changed, so I have a
territory.
Are you assigning customers toa salesman, or do you recommend
(39:28):
doing that?
Or do you give them a geographyand say here's a customer
customers, or here's customersin that geography, go find the
ones that will make up the 8020?
Speaker 2 (39:36):
ones that'll make up the 80-20?
It's a good question.
I have to think it through.
We principally follow.
We try to be the weighingmachine right.
So as I've gotten older, I'vecertainly gotten less
opinionated, because I knowthere's more ways to fail.
Right, and I'm not seeking tobe right, I'm seeking to help
you today and it's like exercise, right, if you, I remember, you
(40:01):
know I ran one marathon.
I will not run another one.
But if you said to me great,you run in 10 minute miles, okay
, let's get to nine, okay,you're not trying to turn me
into an Olympic runner overnight.
So we graft, we bolt onto theirexisting behaviors and try to
(40:22):
level set with a data set thatthe salesperson can share with
their sales manager, call it theboss and agree on the state of
the market.
Now when we fuse in other data.
So generally my experience isit's customers by territory.
But we bring in constructionspending data, we bring in other
(40:42):
external data.
So now there is some connection, which is if a salesperson has
his territory has a dearth ofconstruction spending, it's
abundant.
When you can see the layers andsay bad market, good customers,
(41:05):
this other territory is growingand from the customer's point of
view salesperson go talk to Ron, the GC, on a job, right at the
bidding stage and say what areyour needs, what payment terms,
what kind of uptime, what's theschedule of the project.
You know I'll script for youprobably what you want to hear.
I'll script for you to helpingyou deliver your project on time
(41:26):
and on budget so you can makemoney right and you can pay me
based on performance, whetherI'm selling you equipment or
running you equipment or keepingit.
You know up and running.
So when we link together thecustomer with the jobs that
they're on, with the geographies, with the competitive
marketplace, you can now have amore robust, you can design the
(41:50):
customer experience truly aroundthem.
It's not that hard.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
I suspect one of the obstacles that you have is
you're bringing fresh thinkingto a marketplace that is used to
old-fashioned thinking, and Idon't mean to insult anybody
with that, but that's kind ofthe way it is.
You must receive unbelievableresistance from people oh,
(42:17):
that'll never work here.
I don't have that data, mypeople don't.
That's not the kind of folksthat I have working with me.
Am I getting it right?
Speaker 2 (42:29):
You are.
I'll break it down, though,because you just brought back
something fresh for me.
There is a company it'sactually not in this industry.
They rent and buy equipment,and the CEO was probably a lot
(42:51):
like the younger version of me.
He wanted to do above andbeyond, and he thinks it's his
job to provide this solution.
He's got business intelligence,he's got the data warehouse,
he's got the CRM, and he isblocking the head of sales from
getting the data he needs to dowhat the CEO wants.
(43:12):
The CEO wants to.
He's got people doing fourquotes and people doing 15s.
He knows if he can print thequotes of the fours to the 15th,
ebitda will increase from I'mgoing to make up a number 50 to
60 million.
I'm changing those numbers alittle bit, but just that
increment.
(43:33):
If he gets his fours to 15s,per month, ebitda jumps by 20%.
It's not trivial, and so it'sinternal fighting amongst
themselves.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
Yeah, but what you do there, I agree with the premise
completely.
Well, once I get everybody at15, once I get everybody at 15,
I've run into the ceiling.
There's a capacity issue,that's fair, yeah.
(44:06):
And you know, in the old dayswhat we used to do is you get a
salesman, he starts gettingsuccessful, and you take some
customers away, give it tosomebody else, and now you've
taken your good guy and you'vehurt him, demotivated him and
you've given the customers thenames a rookie where they were
really comfortable with George,with no thinking about or no
(44:33):
respect for what the customerwants.
And that's a common occurrencein every damn market.
So let's shift gears a littlebit and talk about data and
specifically talk about themodel that Amazon uses where
(44:55):
they identified a niche booksthat didn't satisfy big readers,
satisfied casual readers.
The casual reader is going toread the stuff that bestsellers,
that's it.
The real reader wants a broaderview.
(45:19):
So I read three, four or fivedepending, used to be more a
month books.
I'd go to a bookstore, I'd wantto buy the book.
They never had it.
I had to wait.
So I had to pay for the bookand I had to pay for the freight
to bring it in and I had towait.
Here comes Amazon, here comesBezos, and he says you know, I'm
(45:42):
going to get the fast movingbooks and I'm going to offer
them at a lower price.
I'm going to get thefast-moving books and I'm going
to offer them at a lower priceand I'm going to get in on a
price point.
And my argument in selling isthat price is only important
when every other element of thetransaction is the same.
And because you're on the deal,nick, it's never the same.
Nobody else is Nick.
(46:03):
But Amazon went forward, gotsuccessful, and then all of a
sudden they said well, we'regoing to start a club.
Going back to the AmericanAirlines, crandall, when he was
chairman, got a frequent flyerprogram going.
So Bezos said well, see, that'sa good idea.
And there's many other examples.
And he said I'm going to have aprime membership, I'm going to
(46:28):
charge you something annuallyand because of that I'm not
going to charge you for books,for freight.
So you had to do a littlecalculation in your head and
said OK, it's 90 bucks a year.
I buy 100 bucks a year.
If it's a book on freight, I'mmaking money.
Making money, I'll pay the 90bucks.
And that's what he did, andthat thing's up to about 150,
(46:48):
160, but what he did at the sametime was broaden the offering.
Yep, why don't we do that withequipment salesmen, with parts
salesmen, with service salesmen?
Speaker 2 (47:00):
we should first but what do you think?
Speaker 1 (47:03):
standing in the way well, I'm piecing together.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
I, by the way, I love I'm going to say following you
because your mind is is advancedand I'm bright, so I'm going to
replay some things that wasgoing through my head as you
were talking.
So I remember at one point inmy career, finally understanding
, quote unquote, the long tailand meaning what's not in the
(47:30):
bell curve Right and the bus oncurve Correct.
And I also remember hearing anepisode on Bezos where Saul
Price tell you, proving I'm avillage idiot.
Bezos or Saul Price to tell youproving I'm a village idiot.
I went to a school that wasendowed by Saul Price, but I
didn't know that he was at Price, costco or Price forget the
(47:54):
name of his original company,the predated Costco Yep, he was
a big believer in sharing hisknowledge.
As I understand it, um, and hehad shared with brought with
Bezos I might be skipping oneperson, so forgive me, but he
had shared with Bezos is thenotion of always low prices but
(48:15):
sell a membership and capturethe, you know, raise your gross
margin dollars and don't worry.
You know, worry less about thegross margin on transactions.
So, to my knowledge, costcotoday is 12% markup, as I
understand it, give or take.
I think your idea is brilliantand I think it's.
(48:38):
I don't know why somebodywouldn't do it.
They're actually doing it wrong, but they're not.
That's perfect, thank you.
They're not getting the creditfor it and they're leaking money
all over with not having a teamthat operates as one.
So they overspend on marketing.
(49:00):
You go back to that examplewhere 100% of the marketing
capital was spent on call it thelong tail, and where they spent
50 in sgna every.
They had a tax and every dollarspent on marketing to pay the
marketing department.
None of that marketing went tohelp the sales people.
(49:20):
So break, that's one like hugeturd of trust, you know, or
broken trust, sitting in theroom.
They have salespeople undersupported by marketing dollars,
right, relationship marketingdollars.
You have departments with callit animosity.
(49:41):
You have the stupidity ofhanding out promotional products
, right, because that's whatever I'm going to call it, me
too thinking so.
They could easily save thosenickels and dimes everywhere by
having a sort of a.
You know, bezos had a long tailplan Save those nickels and
dimes that they're hemorrhaging,consolidate thatidate that,
(50:05):
take a unified view of thecustomer.
It means sales is not fightingwith marketing, and that's
probably a terrible word.
What I've seen mostly is apathy.
I'm not going to help you.
Go, screw yourself.
Salesperson or a salesperson,they can't talk to marketing
because they've been shut downfor so long.
Not my job, they could do it.
(50:25):
It's just they got a riflethrough the brain.
Damage In marketing.
If I could take it one stepfurther, marketing should really
serve the salesperson right InB2B sales, if 80% of the sales
come from 20% of the salespeople.
Marketing should work for sales.
Go serve them.
Speaker 1 (50:44):
What's interesting is the statement there's no new
business.
Everything you sell today isnew business, to whomever it is,
and marketing is misunderstood.
And your comment aboutmarketing dollars and where
they're going.
Marketing is everything andanything that influences a
(51:07):
customer to buy.
The most important piece ofthat puzzle is the person, the
sales person whether it's on thephone or face-to-face or on the
internet, that gets the sale.
One of the things that wasreally interesting about 15, 20
years ago, when XML came in andreplaced HTML, I knew how long
(51:36):
everybody was on the screenwhere the cursor went, how long
it stuck in every place, I knewwhether they looked at the price
, I knew whether they checkedavailability and I knew whether
they placed an order.
What blew people's minds wasthe next morning I would call
you up and say hey, nick, Inoticed last night you were
looking to get a maintenancedone on that such and such
(51:58):
machine a 500-hour service.
Did you find somebody to do itfor you?
And now the customer on theother end is saying son of a gun
, what the heck does he knowabout me?
But that's the beginning of howcan I help you?
Yeah well said, I don't knowthat you have heard me do it
(52:21):
necessarily, but for the lastseveral years, anytime anybody
asks me for something, I say yes.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
I've heard you.
You said yes to me and you're agift.
Speaker 1 (52:34):
Yeah, and it confuses the hell out of people.
Now, that's not saying I'mgoing to say yes to what you
asked for.
I might change the context.
I might make it something thatI can say yes for.
I might change the context, Imight make it something that I
can say yes for.
But the next one that'sabsolutely more important from
(52:58):
my perspective every client I'vehad is is there anything else I
can do for you?
Or I'd go into clients and I'dsay what product are you having
the most difficulty with thesedays?
And oh, 20, 30 years ago, therewas a real shortage of mining
truck tires.
You couldn't get a tire for ayear or two.
Trucks were being sold and thetires are expensive.
(53:19):
The trucks are anywhere from 30million to 100 million and you
couldn't get tires.
And that's how you move productout of a mine.
How the hell do you deal withthat?
So there's so many avenues inthis where data is critical,
(53:41):
where bringing the data to thepeople who need it is absolutely
necessary.
It's not happening.
Having strategic thinking thatpositions a company to achieve
specific goals, having a purpose, is missing.
(54:03):
Business schools in the last 15, 20 years are regurgitating the
same thing Harvard, yale andDartmouth and the big schools
that for years drove therankings aren't even in the top
10 anymore because they've beencontinuing to put out the same
problem, which everybody nowunderstands doesn't fit this
world anymore.
The world is changing sorapidly Telematics, sensors,
(54:28):
computers, minis, cell phones,all this stuff and here comes
artificial intelligence.
We are not ready for this.
Even younger people aren't upto speed with it.
Nick, I don't want to beat thisthing up, but I think we've
given it a bit of a shot.
I'd like to do another chapteron this in the next couple of
(54:50):
three weeks.
I would be thrilled, and if youever want to.
Speaker 2 (54:53):
I would love your feedback, right, I mean?
We're we're not seeking to beright, we're.
We're truly seeking to helppeople make money and if they
make money, they will livebetter lives.
It's not about greed what Imake, I plan on giving away.
I'm not looking for a biggerhouse, I don't own a boat.
(55:17):
You know blah, blah, blah butwould love to show it to you and
get your feedback and adapt,and I said it to you earlier
today.
There's a few people and I'msure there's more.
It's just who's on my mind you,steve Clegg, there's others
that I believe we can helppeople make money.
(55:39):
Get frankly, have more fun, getout of the brain damage, get
out of hating each other andwhose fault and, frankly,
getting surprised is no fun.
Oh don't, don't surprise me,babe and there's a lot of you
know, I bet was in an in when,when I was at volvo rents, we we
franchised in north america, ineurope we didn't, it was
(56:02):
through dealer distribution andI don't know if you're how, if
you, franchising attracts a fairamount of scoundrels, sort of
get rich quick concepts.
You know, buy my franchisebecause you know and you'll make
a zillion dollars.
There's a lot of vendorspreying on dealers and rental
(56:26):
companies with what I call hopesand dreams and like any hope or
dream, there's usually likenine truths and one lie.
But good luck figuring outwhich one's the lie, because
it's like a drop, it's going tomake you sick, it's the shell
game.
(56:49):
It's aftop, it's the show game,it's, it's f-ed up and so you
got power, bi data warehouses,rental analysis system, dealer
business systems, you know crm,erp, nps, subscription data,
octowazoo, and it's like, let mejust, let me just just grab
onto you like a parasite and getmy bite Right, let me.
I'm going to say they don'treally have a lot of reverence
(57:10):
for the host, right?
Speaker 1 (57:15):
I think that's probably a perfect place to stop
Pick it up as the next chapter.
So, Nick, thank you so much.
Thank you Everybody listening.
Thank you for hanging aroundand listening to what Nick has
to say.
There's a lot of gold in therefor those of you that are
prepared to look for it.
So, thank you, and I'll lookforward to seeing you on our
(57:38):
next Candid Conversation.
Mahalo.
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