SMART SELLING
Anchors Away By Elizabeth Hilla, HIDA senior vice president Salespeople by nature are optimists.
It’s a helpful personality trait in the business – it can get you through the good times and the bad. Optimists believe that things will work out for the best, regardless of how a situation might look at this moment. As a salesperson, you want to deliver the goods or services to create value for your customers. But what if you can’t deliver those supplies in the way that you want, in the timeframe you want because some things are just out of your control? Take the shipping challenges facing the nation right now. If you’re a “glass half full” kind of person, you may say: “Well, at least there are only 61 ships laden with thousands of boxes of PPE and other critical medical supplies waiting to get into the Port of Los Angeles. Last week there were 70!” But at the end of the day, while there may be some improvement, that’s still a really big problem that isn’t going to be solved overnight. It’s a problem that you’ve got to figure out how to communicate with candor. Throughout discussions during HIDA educational sessions, workgroups, and committees, we hear that one of the biggest solutions to meeting challenges head-on is being transparent. When challenges are afoot, or in our current shipping situation, afloat, your customers deserve to know. One of the key takeaways during a panel discussion of C-suite executives at HIDA’s Streamlining Healthcare Conference was that trusted, highly transparent relationships between trading partners lead to a stronger, 50
December 2021
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more resilient supply chain. Straight talk forges those bonds. The successful sales reps are trusted partners who give their customers what they want in today’s rapidly changing pandemic environment – absolutely accurate info. If you’re not sure that shipment is going to be there by Friday, don’t say it’s going to be there by Friday. By Elizabeth Today, successful sales reps are those who are candid Hilla, SVP, HIDA about telling a customer that the product they want is on back order and may not be available for a long time. Over the long haul, the customer is going to remain loyal and trust the salesperson who gives it to them straight. And who knows, because you’re an optimist, the product will get here eventually or maybe there’s an alternative to it that’s available now. Maybe your team will just have to use a different port to get the goods where they need to go. And maybe next week there will only be 50 ships sitting off the Port of Los Angeles.
