Duta Business School Indo

Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

Robert Waks, of the Training Center for Sales and Business Development, told a small-business owner he needed to better understand selling.

Last year, my custom conference table business suffered a collapse in sales that caused me a great deal of anguish and led me to try a number of solutions. Most important, I hired a sales consultant to provide a critical evaluation of our selling methods, to suggest changes and to work with us to carry out those recommendations. This was expensive, costing almost $38,000, but the knowledge we gained from a fresh look at our sales operation provided a number of important benefits.

Here is a quick recap of our sales process at the time the trouble started. Inquiries were coming to us in two forms: as e-mail or as phone calls. We would ask a series of technical questions meant to reveal the functional aspects of the potential client's table needs. We would also ask about the budget. If we received answers, we prepared a proposal, a PDF that contained images of the options we recommended and information on wood choices, power/data options and pricing.

We saw these proposals as a good way to demonstrate our engineering skills and craftsmanship. I had developed the format myself, and we had used it to good effect, with more than $16 million in sales since 2003. I also developed an assembly-line method for the proposals: ask questions, design like crazy and send them off. Next!

When I promoted one of my bench guys, Nathan Rossman, to sales representative, I taught him the same method. And when I added another sales representative, Don Wuest, a year later, he worked in the same manner. We were brilliant at responding to requests, but we did no follow-up. The funny thing is that it was working. At least it was until it wasn't.

At the beginning of 2012, I set a sales target of $200,000 a month, and in the first two months of the year, we hit it. But March came in weak: we sold only $135,732. April was almost as bad. And May was even worse. I hired five people in 2011 to ensure that I could get $200,000 worth of work out the door each month. That was now looking like a mistake.

Naturally, I spent a lot of time thinking about what was happening and eventually I decided my problem was the economy. In spring 2012, there was a lot of chatter about poor job growth and the possibility of a double-dip recession. I latched on to that story and convinced myself that the problem was out of my hands. Then, in May 2012, I expressed my concerns to my Vistage peer group and got some good advice from the other business owners — namely, that the problem was not the economy and that I needed to look within my own organization. One of the members of the group, Sam Saxton, owns a company, Salter Spiral Stair, that is in many ways similar to mine. It manufactures custom items and sells them over the Internet. He told me that he had hired a sales consultant who had helped him double his sales volume in two years.

Being told that my selling methods might need improvement was a blow to my pride. I had been closing deals for 24 years, and I thought I had a pretty good handle on how it should be done. But I called the consultant Mr. Saxton recommended, Robert Waks. And to be frank, he came on a little strong. I was not prepared for a sales professional unleashing his skill set on me. While my main method had been to let my product speak for itself, to tell the story of how we designed and built tables, Mr. Waks suggested a different approach. His pitch was that we first needed to understand selling, pure selling.

Ultimately, I found him convincing. His ideas made sense to me. On the other hand, I was aware that I was getting the full treatment from an ice-to-Eskimos kind of salesman. And his services were not going to be cheap. He recommended a three-part contract: first, evaluations of me, my sales staff and our methods. Then a 10-week training course for me and my staff. And throughout that, and continuing for a year, monthly consultations. One meeting would be one-on-one with me, and the other with me and my three salespeople. All of this would cost $37,000 — $8,000 to start, the rest spread out in 12 payments.

We began with the evaluations. My three sales staff members and I were given psychological profile assessments along with a test to gauge our attitudes toward selling. I was given an additional set of questions designed to reveal my capabilities as a sales manager. Mr. Waks also spent a morning listening in as we talked to clients on the phone.

A couple of weeks after the evaluations, I received a thick report with the results. The good news is that we all had potential to be sales professionals, although some work would be involved. The bad news was that I scored a zero, literally, as a sales manager. I was not performing any of the practices that defined the role. No regular meetings. No continuing training for the salesmen. No consequences for failure to meet goals. No data gathering, other than the gross sales amounts.

Soon after the evaluations, we started classes. These were group sessions, and most of the attendees came from small companies like mine. I was one of the few boss-level attendees. We were taught the Sandler method, which focuses on understanding whether the person we are talking to has power and how to get to the decision maker. It also teaches techniques of influencing interactions with potential customers, to maximize our chance of closing a deal. I realized that we had been making some classic mistakes.

In particular, we were giving away our design and engineering expertise and revealing our pricing way too early in the process. It was an easy task for a potential buyer to hand our proposals to our competitors and ask them to beat our price. Also, we were making no attempt to figure out where our customer contacts sat in their company's hierarchy. We had no idea whether the person we were speaking with could make a decision, and we made no attempt to work our way up the power structure so that we could make our case to the people who would actually choose a vendor. We did not have good systems for keeping track of inquiries, and we were not keeping good records of what the sales staff was doing all day.

By the middle of last July, we started to deploy the new techniques, and we started to close deals again. We also introduced a technical modification to our sales process. Instead of sending out PDFs to clients, we started presenting our ideas in Web chat sessions, using screen-sharing software to show potential buyers a 3-D interactive model of our proposed design. This is very cool to see, but it leaves the client without a set of images to hand to our competitors.

Our sales started to recover in July, and in August we hit our target, closing deals worth $200,607. Even better, we kept up the pace for the rest of the year and, somewhat to my surprise, we have continued to do so. We have exceeded my $600,000 sales goal in every quarter since beginning our sales training.