Private Sector: Customers came because 'Big Daddy' was friend first, salesperson second

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

A few weeks ago, I traveled to Birmingham, Ala., to attend the funeral of Wayne Lloyd, my best sales person when I ran Tollgrade. Since then, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be great salesperson. (As my late father, the founder of our company, liked saying, "Nothing happens until a sale is made.")

Seeing dozens of former customers pay their respects — some driving with their families 15 plus hours — helped me understand how he made his quota month in and month out for more than a dozen years. Like a father, he solved his customers' problems as though they were part of his own family. It didn't matter if it related to work or home; Wayne was everyone's father. That's why my nickname for him was "Big Daddy."

	Chris Allison, ormer CEO of Tollgrade Communications Inc., teaches entrepreneurship at Duquesne University and Allegheny College in Meadville, Crawford County.

Wayne was a barrel-chested Bear Bryant of a man with the guile of a fox and the heart of a lion. He loved having his family living with him on a hard-earned sprawling home on a quiet lake in Alabama. The only problem was that he spent way little time there because my Southern road warrior left home early Monday morning and didn't return home until Friday night.

Even well into his 60s, Wayne was "country strong." I can picture in my mind's eye the image of this burly man carrying two large mammoth hard-shell suitcases through Atlanta Hartsfield Airport along with a briefcase full of computers and cell phones like some Information Superhighway hermit crab.

Wayne always took a week's worth of clothes so he could stay with his customers no matter how long it took to solve their problem.

But he didn't take two suitcases because he was a clothes horse. Quite the contrary, he always dressed in khaki pants, short-sleeve button-downed shirt and vibram-soled dress shoes. He wanted to dress the same way that his telephone company engineer customers dressed. He always fit in.

When people ran into Wayne in a telephone central office, they thought that he was just another "telephone man" who worked there. And not only did he look the part, he was as intellectually proficient as any Ma Bell techie, yet master of the low-pressure soft-selling technique.

When he visited his customers, he was not there to sell the technical attributes of our products. He was there to "ease their pain." He didn't sell telephone trouble-shooting systems — Tollgrade's stock in trade; he sold "makin' more of your customers happy."

Now Wayne could be pretty long-winded and would hold on to a point of view like "a hound dog on a soup bone," but when I was with Wayne on sales calls, all I saw him do was listen. Wayne sold with his ear not his mouth. We wanted to figure out what they needed — not peddle them what he had in his sample bag.

I vividly remember Wayne telling me that the real selling was done during cigarette breaks not during fancy PowerPoint presentations to large groups of "key decision makers." He believed that people didn't really want to say what they were thinking in front of large groups for fear of saying the wrong thing in highly political environments. Gaining one's confidence was a private matter.

Most important, in the tears in the eyes of his customers that I saw as they stood in front of his casket, I witnessed the true reason for Wayne's success. He was genuinely their friend. I heard story upon story of Wayne attending the Little League games of his customer's children or how he sat with them in some hospital waiting room when a loved one was facing a health crisis.

My friend Wayne won his customer's trust by being a good man and a true friend. He figured out what they needed and gave it to them even if he had to do battle with the company that paid him on their behalf. And that is what selling is all about.

Godspeed, Big Daddy.