Winning New Sales With An Operator’s Perspective
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Micheal Gainsley
President R.O.S.E. - Restaurant Operations Services Experts Atlanta, GA |
This opening blog on Building Supplier Relationships is presented with great respect for you, my foodservice and hospitality family. The purpose of this blog is to provide a chain equipment-purchaser’s perspective to equipment manufacturers and other members of the E&S distribution channel on how to build relationships with restaurant and foodservice operators. We begin at the point of new account introductions and will review post-sales requirements and ongoing relationship management between equipment sellers and buyers.
In addressing these topics we’ll look to provide the stakeholders in equipment-transaction relationships with advice and experiences intended to reduce the cost of doing business and improve profit margins. We’ll also describe how to establish a relationship building formula for equipment manufacturers that includes how to engage and communicate with operator-customers.
• Build new customer relationship from the grass roots
You’re an equipment manufacturer trying to figure out how to improve sales and create an ongoing innovation pipeline to generate future sales. So far, you’ve done everything you could think of, including:
- Reducing costs through value engineering equipment
- Investing in new processes, people and production machinery to become more efficient
- Acquiring companies to gain market share and a larger account base to build sales
- Making adjustments to top management
- Improving sales incentives throughout the distribution channels
- Creating finance programs to attract purchases
- Setting-up off-shore production to reduce costs
- Changing manufacturing reps to put fresh faces and ideas on the street.
Have those moves made enough of a difference to your sales and market share? Even if you made them all, are they still working? If not, now what do you do?
Have you considered modeling your business through the eyes of operator-customers? Would you benefit from giving your organization the ability to think like operators in every aspect of your business or are you relying on channel partners to do that for you? Are they doing the job? We believe that equipment manufacturers needs to lead by example -- or at least set in place your expectations for others you count on – that from this point on, operators’ mindsets must be considered whenever equipment solutions are being developed or marketed.
There’s considerable value for manufacturers that choose to move in this direction but, to do so, they need to determine if their corporate resources alone can generate accurate views from an operator’s perspective. If not, manufacturers should consider how to tap into the expertise required get the organization to begin thinking and planning like a targeted operator.
There are some really forward thinking equipment manufacturers today that understand it’s all about the food and have brought corporate chefs on board and placed them in state-of-the-art test kitchens to gain confidence with operator-customers’ equipment packages and meal ingredients. Having a qualified chef gives any manufacturer an advantage, but is it enough? Not necessarily. Reviews and testing of food products on a manufacturer’s equipment does not necessarily mean that those units will successfully deliver desired results in each of the different operator segments. Each operator segment brings with it different opportunities, challenges and profitability. We’ll discuss how to begin a successful manufacturer-operator relationship in part two of this blog.
END OF PART ONE
