For solution sales, face to face interaction is essential. This is true for all industries, not just pulp and paper. One can get away with other forms of communication - like web inquiries, email, phone calls, EDI transmission - when a transaction is commoditized or merely storeroom or stock replenishment. Think of things like another MCC bucket, or a shower nozzle, or a new press felt, or another tote of mystery juice. However, it's the initial agreements that generate the long trickle of ongoing business transactions over time. That initial engagement, that sets up the future flow of POs, needs to be enveloped with trust, knowledge, referrals and case studies, engineering, application specialization, perhaps even trials, and a full economic impact assessment. Try doing that with emails. Or even AI for that matter.
There's something to be said about looking someone in the eye and being totally focused on the ebbs and flows of a conversation. One must minimize distractions, read non-verbal cues, hear what's NOT being said out loud. You can literally read a person. Are they comfortable? Are they stressed? Are there a million other things on their mind? Do they know the answers to questions immediately, or have to research or refer to someone else? I wish I could tell if someone was lying, but alas, it happens. I guess if one were to get trained by the CIA in your commercial approach, they may have "sources and methods" to detect untruthfulness. Nevertheless, personal engagement gets the job done. Not always successfully I might add.
With that personal engagement comes a cost to those involved. Sure, for at least one side of the deal, travel and living expenses come to mind - the gas, plane ticket, meals, parking, hotels, etc. I'd say the biggest cost is TIME, and that's true for both the buyers and sellers. Sellers are seeing many buyers, but buyers are seeing many sellers.
There are many "pros" to this commercial dynamic of face-to-face interaction, and there are a multitude of "cons" as well. Anyone who has attained a managerial level in their career has most likely travelled for work purposes. Things like training, trade shows, factory acceptance test, tours, etc. etc. For those people who travel very infrequently, the whole event can be exciting. Getting out of the mill or office for a couple days is a break in the monotony. Maybe it's a dread for infrequent travelers since they know the work will pile up when they are gone. Whether a mill person likes it or not, they get exposed to the process of travel. Now, consider the other side of a transaction: for some commercial sales people - that's what they do ALL the time. Did you like getting away for a few days from the grind at work or home? For half of all commercial transactions - the grind is on the road.
If you don't mind, dear reader, let me deviate from the flow of this line of thinking for a second. What I would like to interject at this point is the fact that we had generational social experiment at the beginning of this decade that gave everyone a glimpse of travel-less commercial interactions. The Covid 19 pandemic was such an interesting time in all our lives, for better or worse. We ALL experienced it, even our kids and how they engaged at school. School-age kids are one of the best metaphors I can see of how important person-to-person engagement really is. I'm not going to go out and research the impact of online zoom learning, but anecdotally, I would venture to say, learning and social development were stunted. Kids did not learn online to the extent they would have in classrooms. We won't know the outcome of this impact for years.
For those of us working adults, it was hard too. Zoom call after zoom call with anyone you had to engage with. Of course, the operations kept running by some folks showing up to the mills, but all of us in the "overhead" cost category - it got old very quickly. Did you really feel it was better than real eye-to-eye engagement? For me, it was beneficial that I could have 4 or 5 customer engagements A DAY, but it was certainly shallow. Then the cameras were eventually turned off on video calls in month 2-8 of the pandemic, we lost something. People multi-tasked. Effectiveness went out the window.
To bring the column back to the topic of "the road", the Covid experience also demonstrated to me how much of my working time I previously spent on getting from one customer to another. All of a sudden, I had half my week available to me without travel. It was really eye opening. But all that is now behind us now...let's hope. Back to the grind of being on the road again. Back to the airplanes, road trips, hotels, and such. It's not awful, but it takes getting used to. There's a freedom to it, but at the cost of family and friends. Some people I know are away from home 80-90% of the time! How do you maintain a social life, a relationship? How do you parent? You're lugging bags in and out of the car. Checking in and out of hotels. Sitting in diners and restaurants eating alone. It's not glamourous. For all those mill people receiving visitors from your supplier base - I want you to be aware of the rigors and sacrifices it took someone to get to you. YOU ARE THAT IMPORTANT TO THEM.
Many years ago, I travelled with a mill manager to go see an installed piece of equipment at another mill 6 hours away by car. We had an overnight stay due to the distance. It was fraught with travel problems, we were asked to wait hours before hosts could meet us, we ate like crap for at least 4 or 5 meals. Upon our return home, this mill manager, John, expressed a new appreciation for all those salespeople he had seen over many years. It's all part of the job.
Steve Sena (stevesena@me.com) is a Cincinnati native. He obtained degrees in Paper Science & Engineering from Miami University in Oxford, OH and an MBA concentrating in Economics from Xavier University. He's worked for a broad array of leading producers, suppliers, and converters of pulp and paper grades.
