To Build a Top-notch Sales Team, Get out the Hammer and Nails

“When I first got the call I said, `What a flaky idea. A bunch of salespeople, who’ve never held a hammer before, coming in here to rebuild a 12,000 square foot mission complex? It’ll never work and we’ll end up with a worse mess than we have now.’ My architect and others agreed,” recalls Father Joe Carroll, a tough talking priest from New York.

Transplanted to sunny San Diego, he oversees the St. Vincent de Paul Center which provides shelter, meals and clothing for the homeless and for battered women and their children. Father Joe believes in telling it like it is. He’s a no nonsense servant of the Lord with his sights on the everlasting and his feet planted squarely on terra firma.

Before the GE Plastics Division arrived, Father Joe’s mission shelter served 350 people in a building complex that had long passed the point of disrepair both inside and out. After their work was completed, another 150 beds had been added in a brand new residential part of the building.

Initially he had misgivings about the scope of the project: “I figured we would do it because it would get us some publicity and maybe some money from GE. But down the road, I thought we would probably have to clean up after the GE people left. We just agreed that we have to do these things, no matter how big a mess it creates for us.”

Father Joe’s apprehensions never materialized. Instead, beginning in October, a full three plus months before the sales meeting that would change the face of the mission, a smooth running GE rebuilding machine showed up to lay the groundwork for an efficient reconstruction. “Everybody in my group was just shocked at how it went,” remembers Father Joe. “Bob Hess and the others showed up at the mission and met with us every week. They had the thing organized down to the last nail. When it was finished, I was amazed at the quality they put into, not only the effort, but the actual work. They replanted our courtyard, repainted the entire building, rebuilt the partitions, created living quarters that hadn’t existed before. It’s a warehouse so you can imagine what was involved just in terms of size and square footage.”

Bob Hess Plans The GE-Day Landing

The rebuilding project in San Diego began as a way for the newly acquired Borg Warner sales, service and technical staff to meet and get to know their GE counterparts. It was designed to create team spirit and a solid working relationship. It became Bob Hess’s baby the day marketing communications manager Joel Hutt announced his idea to take more than 2,000 unskilled laborers who were gathering for the annual GE Plastics Division yearly meetings – this year in San Diego – divide them into teams, and turn them loose on five targets: the mission, a YMCA located on a military base, a downtown YMCA and its annex at the beach, Camp Surf and a home for boys.

“When Joel gave me the mission project to oversee,” says Hess, “we had already outlined the kind of project we wanted. It couldn’t require skills like bricklaying – that would be too much of a challenge – yet we needed a project that would take a whole lot of people to complete. We also had to be able to start and finish the whole thing in one day. The mission teams all worked on Monday. The Y teams worked on a different day. But each group finished their project by evening of the day they began.” From the starting gun’s first blast to the barbecue at the end of the day, the GE project emitted camaraderie and positive vibes.

“We always have some kind of a project at our yearly sales meetings,” explains Hess. “They’re all designed to develop team spirit and good working relationships. The year before we built shelters in the desert. But after we were finished everyone had the feeling that they’d done all this work and then had to take it down. It was fun and it was a challenge, but where was the value to the community? Then Joel Hutt came up with the rebuilding idea and we just ran with it. Everybody said, `Yeah!’ and got really excited. We got great cooperation from the mission and all their people, GE paid for a lot of materials and local merchants donated others. The whole project was easy to sell to GE. All it took was Ed Koscher’s OK.”

Ed Koscher Said, “Run With It.”

Ed Koscher started his 33 years with GE as a toolmaker. Since then he’s done just about everything at the giant corporation. Now he heads the Plastics Division’s sales force. Although all these folks don’t report directly to him, they all felt the impact of his decision to try something different in San Diego this year.

“For the most part they didn’t know what they were getting into,” explains Koscher. “The idea was to get energy and teamwork from different people from different parts of the country and different functions within the company.” Thus salespeople were teamed with technical and service people and, although none knew the other members of a given team of eight to 10, they elected a team leader and learned quickly how to accomplish a stated goal – say painting a series of walls in the living quarters of the mission – within a limited time.

Work teams were divided and chosen by areas of expertise. Long before the scheduled sales meeting, everyone received a questionnaire that was designed to disguise the project while eliciting vital information. Do you prefer golfing, scuba diving or tennis? Are your favorite activities reading, chess or cards? Have you ever attended a ballet, football game or stage show? Are you experienced at carpentry, plumbing, roofing or none of the above? Anyone who had no experience in manual work was assigned to a painting team and handed a roller, paint, overalls and a ladder. The first teams to actually work on a project had no idea what they were getting into. As the scope of the projects unfolded, shock soon turned into genuine excitement.

There were carpentry, landscaping, roofing, carpet installing, flooring, dry-walling and construction teams. In choosing team captains, only one rule applied: No team leader could be from management. “I believe the real benefit in the project was that we left something positive behind for someone else. Of course we all had a tremendous sense of accomplishment as well,” claims Koscher. “There were always plans for any contingency that might come up. Everything had to be planned in advance and all the possibilities thought out and covered. We had ambulances with rescue squads standing by all day long. Each team had its own safety coordinator. Of the 2,000 participants, only a few suffered minor bruises, blisters and scrapes. No serious injuries of any type were reported.

The success of any project is in the planning. If it’s well planned, you just have to execute it. The extra ingredients are enthusiasm and elbow grease.”

That sounds like an old fashioned prescription in this microcomputer age where events seem to advance at faster than light speed. Perhaps such traditional notions account for GE’s corporate success. Perhaps that’s also why General Electric’s Plastics Division, which purchased Borg Warner this past year, has made such a successful melding into one corporate culture whose foundation rests on the idea of service to the community.

The Good Service Approach

Vicki Garten explains how she was introduced to the mission project, “We got to San Diego on Friday, and found out that on Monday we would be doing a community service project. Another team had already finished theirs the week before so they showed us a videotape of before and after. The enthusiasm started building right there.”

Garten who is site customer service manager for the GE Plastics Division, tells a moving story of her whirlwind day at the St. Vincent de Paul Center. “When I received my questionnaire, I indicated no special area of expertise so at the project I was put on a painting crew. On Sunday night we were grouped at tables by team, handed our blank overalls and given some blueprints that showed specifically what our team job was going to be. Our first project was to design team logos and transfer them to the overalls. In all, they had to orchestrate about 1,000 people. There was a sales meeting, a marketing meeting, a technical meeting and a manufacturing meeting. Bob Hess had planned everything out and it was very, very involved. He had to figure things like – in our group there were eight people – how much painting can eight people do in one day? There was the food, first aid, if someone got sick, transportation, materials, teaching people how to do things right – like installing carpet – and then all the group aspects of getting to know one another and working together as a unit.”

As impressive as the people, statistics are the sheer sizes of the projects themselves. As Father Joe said, “When Bob Hess first came out, he told us they were looking for a project that would require 200 people. Then he called and said they had added another 200 and needed more work. The scope of the thing just kept growing.”

“When I think of a mission,” admits Garten, “it’s like some little church and a priest handing out cups of soup. This mission is nothing like that. It’s huge. I was amazed. The floor that we worked on was for housing battered women. I know that’s a problem, but the entire third floor was for battered women. The whole event was such an emotional experience that just talking about it eight months later gives me goosebumps. I think that what happens is everybody asks for help for the needy, but how often do you actually get out and do something? Usually you just give money. That’s all you’re asked for. At a certain point, you decide what charity you’ll support financially and that’s what you do. That is so different from getting out and doing in someone else’s environment.

“In our case,” Garten continues, “there were eight people staying in each room we painted, which were really little cubicles – eight by ten feet. Their entire belongings were in plastic bags stacked out of the way of the paint crews. As we arrived, some mothers were still leaving for the day and one little boy was crying.”

As Garten’s team walked in, laughing and joking, she spotted the little boy and knelt down next to him to ask what was wrong. “You’re not going to paint my bicycle, are you?” he asked sniffling. “There we were, fat and happy, and here were these two women with six kids, all wearing obviously multiple hand-me-downs…It really touched me,” she remembers and goes on to describe the psychological immunity we all develop. “I grew up seeing the Vietnam War on TV. You’re horrified at first but, after a certain amount of time, you just put up an emotional wall. When we left the mission, the director had tears streaming down his face as he said, `Thank you for your help.’ And we were all thinking, `What’s one day out of our lives?’ To us it was nothing and to him it was everything. I’ve done a lot of things considered to be good works but I probably felt better about that project than anything I’ve ever done.”

Good Things For GE

Although GE’s intentions for the massive San Diego project were to develop teamwork, spirit and a sense of community involvement and contribution, unpredictable benefits accrued as well. “Anytime you get out of your routine and do something from a different perspective and rethink what’s important…that’s very healthy,” declares Garten. “The teams were all cross functional. GE is a very competitive company and also very concerned with customer service. On my team there were the compounding manager from Mount Vernon, IN, the plant manager from another city, the sales manager from Detroit, somebody from marketing, a sales rep and others. We didn’t know each other before we started. While we painted, we got to know each other as people and we took that experience back to our work sites and now we can call to discuss a problem or work concern and be talking to someone we grew with and learned with and shared an emotional experience with.

Two common complaints among salespeople are, “If only the people back at the plant knew what I was up against out in the field.” “If customer service realized what a delay of two days means to the end user…” “Now if there’s a problem or concern,” explains Garten, “I can call the manufacturing person and say, `Hey, Barry, I really have a problem and I need your help.’ So, instead of just competing, like on sports teams, we were doing something worthwhile.”

In addition to intercompany benefits, customers also viewed GE salespeople from a new perspective. “As a result of what we did in San Diego,” comments Garten, “a lot of companies realized they could do something similar in their towns and cities. They also want to be good corporate citizens. After you’ve done a project like this, you’ve laid the groundwork for people to make a contribution in their communities. We rebuilt a mission but we also built pride in ourselves and our own sense of mission. For 10 years at Borg Warner we competed against GE in some product lines. Then we got bought out and I think all the Borg Warner people who were involved in this project said, `Wow, this is something I can feel good about.’ “

Customers Felt Good Vibes, Too

“People like to do business with people who care,” points out Ed Koscher. He readily admits to the longer lasting benefits of the San Diego sales meeting project. GE is not giving out exact figures but cost of materials and contingency fire and rescue vehicles with professional staff are the main items not ordinarily encountered in a sales meeting project. In addition, there’s planning time by in-house staff before the event begins. Although the company had expenses which added up to more than the average meeting, understanding teamwork, finding strength in people, understanding how to run a business and getting more value out of pooled individual talents are difficult commodities to price out on a balance sheet.

“When our people came back from the meeting and started to share their experiences with customers in the field,” comments Koscher, “the customers seemed to get involved and get a better perspective of what GE Plastics can bring to them. People like to do business with people they like and respect. It was just an added selling benefit that we hadn’t considered at all – a free one.” Imagine that. Customers now view GE Plastics’ salespeople as people who want to serve the needs of others.

“All the customers seemed to get a kick out of hearing about the project. They all appreciate it. They all have respect for what we’re trying to do. And we get a lot of questions about it as well,” Koscher explains. “Before, they just thought we went to sales meetings to goof off, spend a lot of money and business as usual the week after.” Annual sales meetings are usually those once a year events where you congratulate each other and yourselves, give out awards, trips and desk sets, stay up late, knock the competition, and go home exhausted. GE’s January meeting was a time to look out at the world and say, “How can we help?”