Driving Drivers to Focus on Sales

What drives any business is the ability to sell and often times operators overlook the idea that everyone on your team, especially when in communication with your customers, is in sales. This means that everyone should be able to effectively articulate and communicate your value proposition to customers and/or potential customers. Furthermore, it should be everyone’s responsibility to ensure that your customers are always satisfied with the service provided, and part of that equation is proactively bringing new ideas and solutions to customers. An often-overlooked sales resource for office coffee and vending operators is your delivery drivers.

What Makes Delivery Drivers the Perfect Sales Representatives?

The basis of any successful sales representative is the ability to build trust and rapport with prospects and customers. Your drivers will have undoubtedly created a trusted relationship with customers, so why not use this relationship to further expand the scope of your product / service offering? This concept is well known by the foodservice industry who will use frontline employees to upsell customers; “do you want fries with that?” is an all-too-common question. Foodservice operators understand that the profitability margin on French fries is substantial which makes the practice of upselling customers using your frontline employees easy, logical, and profitable.

Sales Best Practice 101: Identifying Customer Needs

Identifying the needs of customers is easy and demonstrates that you are paying attention. For example, your driver may notice that one of their accounts is constantly running low on soap and paper towels in the kitchen area; this is a perfect opportunity to offer supplying another service, in this case paper towels and soap. Furthermore, it offers a convenient solution for the customer, demonstrates that your driver pays attention to detail (big and small), and helps to increase the profitability of the account. In fact, your drivers may be a treasure trove of ideas; engaging with them on the subject of expanding the scope of services provided to clients can help to energize them to participate in the initiative of identifying needs and upselling clients.

Additional Services to Consider

If you are interested in taking your vending and office coffee service to the next level in terms of products / services provided, like any sales process it is recommended that you start with a needs analysis. This can be as simple as talking to your clients about what their pain points are, and, as noted above talking with your drivers about what they may have noticed while on their delivery routes. For example, your client may be struggling to get employees to come back into the office to work a few days per week, they may be having challenges with employee retention, etc. Are there services that you could offer to help make the work environment more enjoyable? For example, perhaps the customer is open to providing free breakfast for employees (cereal, milk, toast, coffee & tea, etc.). This would be an easy program to initiate, will help the client create a more welcoming and fun environment for staff, and increase the profitability of the account.

Help Is at Your Fingertips!

We would be amiss to finish this article without a little upselling of our own. For vending and office coffee operators who are also members of Complete Purchasing Services / GESPRA (formerly known as Univend) take advantage of our free membership which provides access to “Best Value” pricing on thousands of essential products and services in addition to the opportunity to earn CASH REWARDS on your purchases. In addition, our team of locally-based Account Managers are available to help you maximize your program benefits and profitability. If you are not yet a member and want to learn more, please visit eCPS.ca.

No matter what your current offering and scope is there is always room for innovation and your drivers may be the key. In the words of the renowned leadership coach Ben Simonton “turned on people figure out how to beat the competition. Turned off people only complain about being beaten by the competition.” Good ideas can truly come from anywhere and finding ways to engage your employees in the success of your business will drive employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and ultimately your profitability.

About the Author:

Jennifer Bobson is the Director of Marketing for Complete Purchasing Services Inc, a leading supply chain solutions provider for hospitality and non-commercial clients in Canada. Learn more about Complete Purchasing Services by visiting eCPS.ca.