Lately, I’ve been pondering an overlooked but important slice of our industry. Electrical distribution is sales-driven; everybody talks numbers. We baby boomers can rattle off changes in selling over the course of our careers. However, regardless of whether we are boomers, Gen Xers or millennials, very few of us see customer interaction in 2025 being the same as it was in the “good old days” before the internet. At the same time, we all agree our businesses are built on customer-facing services. And, distributors will always be out there sitting, standing or somehow interacting with customers.
I have always had a keen interest in the young people coming into our ranks, but this year I decided to make it a bit more formal. I budgeted the time to interview new salespeople. My ultimate goal is to confidentially interview 200 new distributor sales professionals over the course of 2018. To qualify for my project, sales professionals must have less than two years of selling experience with a distributor.
Why go through the trouble?
I am working to better understand five questions impacting distributors:
- Has the wholesale industry improved its outreach to prospective employees?
- How is the industry positioning to replace the aging baby boomers in the sales force?
- How do new sellers feel about our industry?
- Do distribution companies have onboarding processes? If so, what do newcomers think of them?
- How do millennials view the future of selling in our business?
How is the information gathered?
My consulting firm has conducted nearly 30 interviews in and around the electrical, automation and closely-related lines of the distributor trade. During the conversations, we asked the following questions:
- How did you find your way into this role?
- What was your background prior to getting into this industry?
- Describe the kind of onboarding process you went through as a seller?
- What have you learned since you started working in this role?
- What do you know now that you wish somebody would have told you during the first week?
- What message would you provide to other newcomers entering the world of distributor selling?
Much of what I learned from these conversations will come as no surprise. Other comments will cause you to pause and ponder the shifts in our industry and the generational differences.
Distribution: Still not seen as a glamorous business
Distribution started out as a “Main Street” kind of business. Many who worked in the industry found their way into it through word of mouth–they knew somebody who knew somebody who got them a job. We discovered less than half of the new sellers we interviewed landed their job this way and electrical wholesalers are moving away from using this informal method of attracting new employees.
However, demographics are pushing up against electrical wholesaling. As a substantial number of baby boomers approach retirement, our industry faces a shortage of skilled workers. Our industry doesn’t ooze with overnight billionaire mythology either. While thousands of young adults aspire to blast their used cars to Mars via Elon Musk, they can’t name a famous leader in distribution.
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Finding the next-generation salesforce
Several of the new sellers we interviewed came into distribution by way of a company summer intern plan. A company can hire college students for the summer and expose them to the industry to see if they like it. Meanwhile, the company has an opportunity to examine potential employees’ work ethics. The rookie sellers who took a job after the internship unanimously felt their company gave them meaningful work and said one of the highlights of the internship was interacting with experienced sellers.
College career days are also quite successful in bringing in recruits. Those who were first introduced to electrical wholesaling in this manner indicated they were impressed by the personalized management style of the distributors. A couple of them candidly commented they wanted to work in a company where the president was available for and open to conversation. Culture matters.
New salespeople have degrees
We met three individuals who graduated from college with degrees in industrial distribution. One of these sellers was a product of the well-known Texas A&M program; there are 19 degree programs throughout the country. All three came into the business through a national chain and identified themselves as taking “a management track” where sales is an important but temporary stop. Message to distributors: New salespeople want to understand your vision of their future.
Two-thirds of the new sellers we interviewed have some kind of technical background. One had a degree in electrical engineering. The rest had technology-based and sciencebased backgrounds ranging from aerospace engineering to industrial technology. We discovered the median starting salary for electrical engineers is higher than other curriculums.
What is the state of onboarding?
Sadly, 1970s-style onboarding lives on. Most distributors still lack a meaningful onboarding process. The typical scenario is to put the newcomer in the warehouse for a few days, with inside sales for a couple of weeks and with a couple of experienced sellers for a day or two before declaring him/her the new sales kid.
Most of those we interviewed reported that they were dazed and confused during the first six months of selling. One seller made the gut-wrenching decision to find a different employer based on what he described as “a need to start my career off right, rather than thrash around for years learning by trial and error.”
At the other end of the spectrum, we discovered training plans that took more than one year and included documentation, goals and supervision. Let’s look at two of these training plans:
- Replacing the retiring salesperson: The rookie works with a retiring salesperson for a year. At the beginning, the newbie serves as an assistant. During the first couple of months, he/she sets up demos, orders samples, takes care of routine enterprise resource planning system quotes and follows-up on some calls. Later, duties expand to making calls and pulling in the experienced colleague as needed for more difficult applications. Toward the end of the year, the exiting seller visits key customers to check on service levels and gather coaching points. The retiring member of the team continues to coach the newbie after retirement with a bonus structure the company has in place.
- Creating an expansion territory: The new seller is assigned a territory created with “C” accounts from the current sales team. The “C” accounts are designated as such using a series of exercises tied to data mining, including researching accounts based on industry sector, number of employees and previous purchases. With an eye for creating a list of the best 100 prospects, suppliers, other salespeople and LinkedIn are used to compile a contact list. In the early months, the freshman seller provides weekly progress reports to the sales manager and an assigned mentor. Furthermore, the newbie visits experienced salespeople’s “A” accounts to better understand buying habits and fine-tune product expertise. The new seller also makes introductory calls and gathers a prescribed list of information about accounts.
Unexpected new seller observations
At the end of each of our conversations, we ask, “What have you discovered in the past year that you feel needs to be shared with others entering our field?” Many of the answers new sellers gave run against the views of their more experienced brethren in distributor sales. Here is a short list of answers:
- “I wish someone would have told me how important organizational skills are to this job.”
- “There is no way a person can keep track of customer names, opportunities, products used and everything else without some kind of software.” (About one-third of our interviewees were ready for customer relationship management (CRM) software implementation).
Several of the new employees who worked for companies without CRM software went so far as to seek out free or low-cost versions for their own use. Two of them referenced the free product at streak.com, which is a Google Gmail overlay. Another new seller decided to streamline territory management with free tools from Google Maps and created a “hot map” showing customer clusters by gross margin.
In an era when Amazon and e-commerce are sending quivers of worry down the spines of sellers with 20-plus years of experience, one new seller said, “I discovered about nine months in, I am the reason customers should buy from our company.” This rookie salesperson invested a great deal of personal time toward learning how to help customers technically, logistically and with other processes. Without coaching, this new seller concluded some customers are only interested in driving down prices and don’t deserve his company’s “brand” of service.
Another young person who was thrown into the salesperson version of “Daniel’s Lion Den” with very little sales and negotiating training, said, “Purchasing agents and buyers try to beat me down on price. I’m not a price pushover anymore.” After two years, this salesperson already recognizes distributors are in a constant state of price negotiation. This seller also sees strong payback in attending some kind of negotiations training, such as that from SPASigma.
One of the new guys lamented the poor way other salespeople in the company treated reps and said, “I have to be nice to the reps because they are a source of free business.” He learned early how to “mine manufacturers for leads” and sees the reps as gatekeepers for leads and other great business opportunities. This new seller has breakfast with a different rep every Friday morning and attributes a major portion of his account list’s growth to these breakfasts.
A few parting thoughts on new sellers
New sellers can be hard-headed and sure of themselves but they learn their lessons by trial, error, fire and ice. The new generation has tons of resources available to them via the internet and a few of them like discovering how to use them. Distributor management has not kept up with the need for building an onboarding process. Experts say it costs $150,000 to bring a new distributor salesperson up to speed. While we should be investing in ways to stack the deck in our favor and maximize our investment, we’re not.
I want to hear from more new sellers!
I have established a survey for new distributor salespeople. All of the information collected will remain confidential to River Heights Consulting and no names or company-specific data will be shared. Take the survey at tinyurl.com/New- Sales-Person-Survey.