Case Study:

 

Red Spot and Varnish

Red Spot

Red Spot Paint and Varnish Gains Million Dollar Price Differential by Selling Value

Red Spot Paint & Varnish, an industry-leading plastic coatings manufacturer, experienced five consecutive years of flat or declining sales. As a result, Red Spot introduced an intense sales-management training program with The Brooks Group followed by IMPACT Selling® training for their geographically dispersed sales team across the US, Canada and Mexico.

Situation

Since the 1920’s Red Spot Paint & Varnish has been the innovative leader in the molded plastics industry providing high performance coatings for automotive plastics as well as pioneering new coatings for the sports and consumer products industries. However, the company saw five consecutive years of flat or declining sales.

Solution

Red Spot began an intense sales-management training program with The Brooks Group. Next, Red Spot rolled out IMPACT Selling training for its entire force of industrial account representatives.

Because of the length of Red Spot’s sales cycle – between 18 and 24 months – integrating the IMPACT system into their sales culture and seeing its success took patience and persistence. Within 12 months, positive stories rippled through Red Spot demonstrating that the training was driving results.

Mike Merkel, then VP of Commercial Products, shared one such story:

A major Red Spot prospect was doing business with a competing company. Through the IMPACT training, a Red Spot Representative had learned the 3-level strategy for maximizing relationships within a prospect organization – even with prospects that seemed to be loyal and satisfied customers of competitors.

Thanks to the IMPACT training, the representative was in a position to ask for a trial when he heard the prospect voice concern regarding a problem with Red Spot’s competitor. The trial proved successful and the prospect asked for a proposal.

Red Spot’s proposal quoted a price that was 20% higher than the competitor’s. Mike explained the strategy that Red Spot used to secure the business at the higher price, “Using the skills we learned through the IMPACT training, we continued to value sell at all levels of our organization… we are now supplying this business [at the 20% higher price] valued in excess of $1,000,000 annually.”

Results

With an 18-24 months sales cycle, Red Spot had to wait nearly a year to see results from their training.  The results were worth the wait; industrial account representatives put their training to work to win a large contract away from a competitor at a price that was 20% higher than the competitor’s – a differential of more than $1 million annually!

The Bottom Line For Red Spot

The success of the Red Spot initiative is best summed up by Red Spot’s Mike Merkel, “We gain more momentum with every success and week to week we are seeing success… this stuff really works.”

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