June 2010
Man on a mission Gavin Meyer is the co-founder and Managing Director of Itec Connect, a business which is on a charge. He took some time out to speak to SALESGURU about the way the game is changing and what he has learned about it through 14 years in office automation. Connect It’s no small feat the change the name of a successful business, but that’s what happened last year when Itec North became Itec Connect. Partly the rationale was a change at group level , which freed the various Itec franchises to service customers wherever they were rather than just in their geographical area. Partly however, it was a significant change in the products Itec Connect sells and the ways in which it sells them. “Connect is everything to us. It’s about relationship selling, our relationships with our staff and our customers. It’s about connecting the various technology categories we sell. It’s a broad ribbon of DNA that runs through everything we do. Connecting opportunities with customers and solutions and backing that all up through an organization where sales and service and support are connected with product specialists and industry experts,” says Meyer. “We’ve really worked hard at creating this Connect brand which is underlined by the DNA of the company. And the number one link in our Connect DNA is customer relationships. Going back, I would have loved to have come into this company, then, as a salesperson.” How the game has changed “There are definite similarities between the office automation industry I started out in and the one that exists today. When you’re box dropping, it’s all about a commodity and your prices are set. But today, you’ve got the flexibility to put bigger deals together and ultimately earn a lot more commission. Today we sell six or seven lines of product. So a good salesperson with the ability to grow relationships today can sell telephony, voice and data solutions, office automation, biometrics and security and so on. With those relationships, our top performers can make big numbers.” The time for direct selling is over “We don’t even have a direct sales team anymore. That’s how strongly I believe you can’t sell like that. We work on new business strategies but we don’t have people out knocking on doors. We select companies we want to deal with and we take a strategic view instead of just, let’s take 20 guys and put them on the street and hope that one of them comes back with something. Even the sort of business you’re attracting with that model doesn’t excite me anymore. Our strategy is to have hunters in the right places and put resources behind them: a Client Liaison person and Product Specialists with him because there is no way today, with the number of products we offer, a hunter can do all of those products justice. “ “So the hunter hunts and does face-to-face with the customer and builds relationships, but he isn’t expected to do the other frustrating work that a good hunter will never be good at. He has a Customer Relationship person for that and that role within this company is becoming greater and greater.” Staying in front of customers “I still see customers all the time, personally. That’s what I believe my job is. You can still call the switchboard and press 7 and get straight through to me. I have already taken two calls this morning. I like structuring deals and I think that’s where I need to be. My day-to-day is driving growth of this business.” Best company to work for “We’re working very hard with Deloitte’s to be the best company to work for. This is very important to us and we measure ourselves against that because it is a national standard. We really want to be an employer of choice; that’s important to us. It’s about being part of something bigger and I think we have all of that here. We’ve employed an outside consultant that is working with us for three months to help us achieve that.” Taming the beast “Work/life balance is an area that I’ve got quite badly wrong and it’s an area I am focusing on a lot. You have to make some strict rules. I don’t have appointments before nine so I have flexibility in the morning to spend time with my kids and occasionally take them to school and connect with them. There it is again, Connect.” “I don’t play golf on the weekends anymore like I used to because that is the whole day gone. My wife and I mountain bike together. You have to find the balance because otherwise it isn’t worth it because you can lose all perspective.”