Bill Canady walks through how a company found $250 million in untapped business with Toyota, its top customer generating $40 million yearly. By focusing resources on the biggest accounts instead of chasing 7,000 smaller ones, they hit their $200 million sales target. The real struggle: convincing your sales team to accept the shift when they fear losing commissions.
So it just depends on the organization. You know, for me, the biggest challenges that we have faced has been getting the folks inside to make the changes. Customers are generally always excited about it. The, you know, the customers like being taken care of. We had one little business that, that we had. We came in and we said, all right, how are we going to grow this business? Everyone had a bunch of ideas. And we said the number that we needed to go get was $200 million. We need to go get $200 million of sales. In order to be successful. That was the goal. We sat down and we did this little exercise. We said, what's our top 10 customers? We went through our top 10 customers and we wrote their names on the board and we said, what are we doing with— our number one customer was Toyota, right? And we did $40 million a year with Toyota. It was a great customer. We love Toyota. It's a wonderful place to do it. And we said, what would Toyota be worth? What would it be worth? What could we be doing with them? And we put some limitation on it. We said it had to be with the products we already had in the areas that we were already doing business with them. So in other words, we weren't going to go to Japan. So it had to be, you know, we did business in the United States in these areas with these factories, with these types of products. And the salesman who knew the customers really well got up there and wrote it down. And just in Toyota, there was over $250 million worth of business that we were not getting, that we had what I call an entitlement to it. In other words, It was in our geography we dealt with, with products that we could sell them. We just were not selling them. So think about that for a second. We're doing $40 million. There's $250 million more dollars. Our goal to get to was just $200 million. We could, if we could have won all that business, we could have got there with just one customer. Think about the powerfulness of this, right? Because we had over 8,000 customers. We could achieve everything with one. That's what 80/20 does for you. It shows you where it's available at. So why wouldn't we shift as much resources to Toyota to go absolutely take care of it? And by the way, that's exactly what we did. We did grow it. We did not get it to $250 million, but that and those top 10 customers were more than enough for actually us to go and achieve all our goals, which we did achieve. And that's what you learned with this, right? Well, while you're doing that, And you recognize that, hey, there's Toyota here and there's these top 10 customers. There's another, what'd I say, 8,000? There's another 7,000+ customers. Everybody in your company, there's somebody who's hooked to those other 7,000. They're gonna be wondering, oh my God, what's gonna happen to me? Am I gonna lose these other customers? Am I gonna quit making money? I make commission off of it. I make bonus off of it. They're gonna be wondering what it means to them. And that's really what you have to deal with is, How do you shift all that? Because there's going to be people who will feel left behind and potentially become at risk. They will fight you against it. As the leader, as the operators, you have to make sure you put a plan together that everybody can see exactly how they're going to get there. At the end of the day, we have an obligation to the business as a whole to make sure that everyone's going through with it. And sometimes that means people who want to do something different, They go somewhere where they could be successful within that. So when you're coming in, you're doing it, the biggest challenge you're going to face is getting your team to buy in on it. And as the visionary, as a CEO, you have to, one, set that goal. You have to organize yourself around it. But most importantly, you have to carry the team with you. They got to believe and they've got to actually go do it because ultimately it's just people who are doing it. Some people are going to feel left behind. You have to know how to deal with that and you have to deal with it in such a way that one does respect, gives respect and dignity to what's going on, but also makes that, that vision, that place you're going, you want to make sure all the people that are there are actually focused around it. And if you find you can't do it right, you make changes with it. So it is an exciting time and it's sometimes a nail-biter, but it's the most rewarding thing you're ever going to go through.
