After a nearly disastrous period of decline which brought them to the brink of bankruptcy in 1986, Purolator Courier Limited has risen from the ashes to become Canada’s number one over night courier. It now dominates Canada’s crowded overnight shipping market with a 45 percent market share.

In the past 18 months, under the watchful eyes of Onex chairman Jerry Schwartz and Purolator CEO Fred Manske, Purolator has revamped a directionless sales force, eliminated lackluster service and achieved tremendous success to the tune of $560 million in sales in 1991 alone. Emphasizing flexibility, service excellence and team-oriented partnership selling, the repackaged and revitalized Purolator is now on target with a new approach that sells deliveries and delivers sales.

PARTNERSHIP SELLING

Andy Hunt, Senior Manager at Purolator, told Personal Selling Power: “In the past two years we’ve completely revamped our approach to the customer. Instead of looking at the relationship on a one-to-one basis, we now focus on helping our customers provide a better product to their customers. We want to work with our customers as partners, focused together on a common goal.”

When asked about the key to partnership selling, Hunt responded: “We have to understand foremost how our customer interprets the partnership. Interpretations differ from client to client. The key is to penetrate each customer’s needs and continuously build on what the customer wants from the partnership. For one company, that may mean integrating our system with theirs. For another, that could mean long-term negotiations with multiple departments. We have to adapt our partnership capabilities to the needs of the customer.”

TEAM SELLING

To build these partnerships, Purolator salespeople must first do what Hunt calls “account penetration.” Especially with larger, more complex sales, Purolator approaches prospects with a sales team that establishes multiple contacts at multiple levels. “For our national accounts,” Hunt says, “we are required to have at least ten senior contacts. Our senior VP of marketing should know their senior VP of marketing so they can work together. This is true up and down the corporate ladder. Plus we use our Information Systems people extensively to examine how our systems can work together.

“They analyze the prospect’s computer system, then come up with ways we can either integrate the two systems or make them work together on some level. Their analysis gives our salespeople an added selling boost. At other companies the salesperson is asked to be all things to all people and will have to go to the MIS department and try to understand these complex systems; at Purolator we use the team concept which lets our salespeople concentrate on what they know how to do best sell.”

THE MATHEMATICAL EQUATION OF VALUE

At Purolator, partnership selling and team selling are only two aspects of what regional sales manager Robert Tersigni calls “maximizing the mathematical equation of value.”

He told PSP, “Anyone can move a package from point A to point B. To stand out from the crowd, we need to concentrate our selling focus on our great strength, which is customer service. In an industry where customers will change couriers over a penny per pound, we are always going to have competitors undercutting our prices. To compete with the cheaper competitors, we deliver the highest combination of low price and great service.

“We have to sell our customers on the greater value they receive by using our service. For some customers that means the 9 a.m. Daystarter delivery. Others have intricate computer system needs that we can adapt to more readily than our competitors can. We are succeeding because we’re doing whatever it takes to increase the mathematical equation of value we offer our customers.”

Tersigni also emphasizes upper-level management’s new attitude toward bridging the gap between every level of operations, sales and management.

“In the past 18 months we have eliminated three full levels of management. Everyone is involved in the sale now, whether that means salespeople on the street, MIS people or executive VPs. Any salesperson can, and should, feel free to call anyone who can provide information essential to closing a sale.

“For one government account, the salesperson analyzed a prospective agency’s overnight needs and decided that, to accommodate them, we would have to develop a new product we had never offered before. The salesperson went straight to senior management to see if this was feasible. Management took a look at it, decided the potential gain in government accounts was worth the cost, then came back with a quick response saying, `Let’s do it.’

“This was a major culture change for us and it took time. You can’t just tell people it’s OK to call senior VPs and suddenly everyone’s doing it. It happens through word-of-mouth. One salesperson gets an immediate response from senior management and the news spreads. Soon everybody is infected with a whole new attitude about service and flexibility. We’re still in the process of developing that particular product, but we have established the up and down communication pattern and people use it every day.”

FLEXIBILITY

Barbara Leclair may understand the need for flexibility best of all the sales experts at Purolator. As Manager of Government Services, Leclair must coordinate her selling effort toward the complex and specific requirements of targeted government agencies.

“Government accounts don’t fit the typical customer mode most salespeople are used to,” she said. “They require a great deal of flexibility from the sales team because each agency has numerous decision-makers and operates with a unique set of rules and needs. We have to understand each agency’s budgeting, where its funding comes from, what are the consigning codes, not to mention the often convoluted government paper trail. That’s why we have a specific Government Services Department to figure out, analyze and do our best to accommodate those complex needs.”

Team selling, building relationships, staying flexible and delivering service excellence all come into play with government accounts. “Because government accounts will almost always need a customized solution,” Leclair explains, “you have to bring all the creative and innovative powers at your disposal to bear on the account. Plus, because there are so many decision-makers we have to have strong relationships with someone in each department. That means operations and sales work more closely than ever before.

“We will actually bring operations and administration people with us on sales calls to determine what solutions are workable with our system and the customer’s system. That cuts down on our response time and can be extremely important in closing the sale. It also reinforces our ability to build long-term relationships.”

THE RIGHT PEOPLE

Purolator’s salespeople today are an exclusive group of highly trained, motivated individuals working together to achieve greatness. Before implementing the changes that began 18 months ago, Purolator’s management conducted an extensive review to understand the lifestyle themes their very best people shared.

They discovered that these individuals were problem-solvers, highly competitive, and had large egos and a strong sense of integrity. Purolator then instituted an interview process to find people from both within and outside the company who matched this profile.

Unlike most companies, Purolator didn’t want a bell curve sales force with high, low and average performers. Using the criteria established by the review and interview process, Purolator isolated the characteristics of top performers and sought them out. Purolator’s current crop of 120 supersellers is driving record-breaking profits during the worst recession Canada has seen in decades.

THE SELLING PROCESS

In the past, Purolator salespeople might have wondered exactly what was expected from a sales professional at Purolator Courier. No more. The new management believes that selling is a process. If salespeople follow the process they will inevitably reach their sales goals.

“That’s why we encourage salespeople to work on the process,” says Maurice Levy, senior vice president of sales at Purolator. The process is laid out in a specific, 12-page performance expectations manual for a Purolator sales professional.

“We take our salespeople through every step of the sale, from pre-call preparation to support. These expectations include everything from pro-actively anticipating buyer tasks, personal motives and potential objections to using a presentation easel to assist buyers in visually perceiving the benefits of shipping with Purolator. We also teach territory management, account management, fiscal responsibilities, teamwork, resource utilization and self-development. We are building a complete team of sales professionals.” The theory behind all this is quite simple: it is much easier for salespeople to perform up to expectations when they know exactly what is expected of them.

“To maintain the standards we teach during sales training,” Levy continues, “sales managers must spend a minimum of three days a week on the road with their salespeople. They have a specific sales process checklist which they use to evaluate salespeople. We also conduct performance reviews for every member of the sales force twice a year. All these efforts are focused on honing the skills that will close more sales through the process.”

Purolator also rewards sales success. Through the MERIT incentive program, top sales representatives and executives, as well as sales support staffers and sales secretaries, are given a quarterly banquet where they are awarded plaques to honor their performances. Not wishing to waste this concentration of sales excellence, the next day managers use these top performers as a focus group to exchange ideas that might help the company perform better in the future.

Each year the top 15 percent performers in both sales and operations are chosen as members of Purolator’s exclusive “President’s Club.” All winners and their families go on a paid vacation to a designated resort, usually in the Caribbean. Along with many other recognition awards at the yearly company banquet, the five top performers in the company are selected for induction into the Purolator Hall of Fame.

“The salespeople love these incentives,” Levy says. “We do a number of week-to-week or even day-to-day updates and close sheets that go out to all the salespeople and the President’s Club rankings come out quarterly. If there’s an award out there, all our salespeople want it. Our people love the added competition; seeing how they are doing in comparison with the rest of the sales force really drives them to achieve. It’s a constant reminder that salespeople can’t be treading water. In this business treading water means the same thing as sinking.”

TECHNOLOGY

Purolator also makes a firm commitment to use of the available technology to deliver better customer service. The fully-staffed MIS department works exclusively on creating integrated systems between Purolator and its customers. This includes a software development group that works to build programs to integrate customer systems into the Purolator system.

These expensive initiatives pay for themselves by building mutually dependent relationships with Purolator’s customers, who often agree to be corporate guinea pigs for system innovations. This, in turn, guarantees customers that they will have at least a temporary industry monopoly on innovative services while guaranteeing that Purolator will be their exclusive courier. In such a case vendor and customer share benefits, burdens and opportunities.

Whereas two years ago customer automation was virtually nonexistent, Purolator now conducts three system revisions per year, updating any technology, whether in monitoring packages, developing software or improving hardware capabilities. All packages are currently tracked by bar code on the Purotrak queueing system which monitors packages with hand-held scanners at every stage in the delivery process.

This means customer problems move through the system more readily than ever before. Purolator guarantees that if a customer problem isn’t solved by the end of the day that customer will receive a call first thing the next morning explaining exactly what happened and how Purolator plans to correct the error.

Brent MacLennan, managing director of sales for Ontario, understands that service oriented automation demonstrates genuine flexibility and helps establish long-term partnership relationships with Purolator’s customers. He explains how his most memorable sale involved using technology to sell one of Canada’s top running shoe manufacturers on Purolator’s services:

“This customer told me that our shipping system was fine, but because his system and ours could not `talk’ to each other he wasn’t interested. He said, `I need a local network to automate billings, weights, etc. If you can give me that I’ll give you some business.’

“Now, because of our new corporate flexibility and team selling approach, the sales manager, salesperson and I were all there on the sales call and could go back to corporate and say, `Here’s what we need to do,’ and get the ball rolling immediately. Closing that sale did two things for us: One, it was the first time we were forced, because of a customer’s specific technical requirements, to do networking through three different systems. Two, the system we developed for this shoe manufacturer is unique to Purolator, and has now brought us business from six to ten other smaller companies that we’ve been able to network as well. The results so far have been absolutely terrific, both for us and for our customers.”

THE COMPETITION

In the over crowded, highly competitive overnight package delivery industry, couriers that differentiate themselves from the pack stand the best chance for emerging atop the pile of also-delivereds.

Through every aspect of its sales, service and operations Purolator seeks groundbreaking standards to challenge the competition. Sometimes a little creativity can make all the difference in landing a big account.

Microsoft is one such account. Purolator recently lured Microsoft away from arch rival Federal Express. Levy explains what attracted Microsoft to Purolator: “We analyzed their system and figured out that they weren’t processing freight as quickly as they could. We worked with Microsoft’s MIS people to download all their orders into our shipping system. This moves the freight out automatically. Now they don’t have to enter all this data into the system manually. Our competition had the account for two years and never even looked at this possibility. That, to me, represents the main difference between Purolator and the competition.”

As Andy Hunt explains it: “Our biggest competitors have the capability to create these types of systems, but don’t have the corporate culture to respond as quickly to customer needs. Our smaller competitors may be lower priced but don’t have all the capabilities we can bring to a customer. We have the best of both worlds quick like a small company but powerful like a corporate giant.”

MacLennan sees the biggest difference between Purolator and the competition as a matter of professionalism, personal involvement and commitment to corporate goals: “We don’t try to do our selling through mass advertising like most couriers. We don’t solicit business over the phone. We are very professional.”

Because of Purolator’s high market share in Canada, most new business comes from existing accounts. And because most big clients use a variety of couriers, Purolator salespeople are always trying to maximize the company’s share of customer business over the competition. Some have even been known to don courier uniforms and ride on pickups and deliveries to see how both clients and prospects operate.

Whether they generate leads from trade journals or because someone spots a competitor’s van in a company’s driveway, Purolator salespeople always call on prospects in person. Once prospects become customers and want to see someone about a problem, they will always talk to a live person. That alone has won Purolator converts from competitors who, after making the sale, expect the system to handle problems.

In the recent past, being the best courier required little more than delivering a high volume of packages on time to the right location every day. But that standard is no longer exceptional; it has become the industry norm. Today, when customers say, “I can get on time delivery of my packages from almost anyone. What else can you offer me that will give me the edge on my competitors?” Purolator can answer with value added services.

During the freewheeling 1980s, corporate success stories were a dime a dozen. Then came the ’90s recession with its tight budgets, reorganizations, and new focus on value and service. Competing in this market demands that companies exceed customer expectations with value added products and standout service.

Especially in such a highly competitive field as the overnight delivery industry, value and service become competitive success tools. Purolator Courier of Canada has found that even during the toughest of selling times, sales excellence combined with superlative customer service still deliver sales success.

Just as Federal Express in the 1980s forced competitors to match its dedication to on time service, Purolator Courier is setting an unparalleled standard for service excellence in the 1990s, creating corporate partnerships to last a lifetime. And that doesn’t just happen overnight.