Tips For Selecting The Right Floor Care Equipment & Supplies

By David G. Champagne, Vice President & Founder of Beacon Distributors, Inc., Harrisville, RI

David G. Champagne

As a young(er) sales rep in the jan/san industry, I had a customer who had tile floors that were not up to his standards. The shine just did not hold up well. We discussed the products I offered and eventually was handed a PO for $1,500 worth of floorcare items. This was a nice opening order for supplies to deal with one area, and the customer had many areas and buildings! To put it in perspective Google says that $1,500 in 1990 is equal to about $3,600 today.

I thankfully accepted the PO, folded it, and put it in my suit coat pocket. (Believe it or not, we did still wear them in 1990!) I looked at the customer and told him that I would fill the PO when I knew he had a plan in place to maintain the floors. I knew he had no burnisher or procedures in place for routine maintenance. That was the key reason his floors did not live up to his standards. After some discussion, I helped him establish the proper floorcare program, and came away with a PO for a burnisher, also! And many other orders after that.

The point is that any type of equipment is only a part of a complete process. From a vacuum to an extractor, or a buffer to an auto scrubber, equipment without the correct chemicals and procedures in place will only result in a customer who is unhappy!

Sizing To The Job

One thing I often see is a customer who has been sold a machine that is bigger or smaller than they really need. In many cases such an end-user has parked the machine because it is just too cumbersome or time consuming to use.

A mall with a 100,000 square foot of open area can certainly use a ride-on scrubber with wide scrub head. Now take that same 100,000 square feet and make it into a service area for an automotive store with lifts, tool benches and all sorts of equipment, and that same machine is not the right unit to clean all the tight areas that exist.

The opposite extreme would be selling the mall a 20-inch corded scrubber “because it’s cheap and fits in the budget.” As a rep who wants a long-term relationship with the end-user you must look beyond the customer’s thoughts of what they need, the current commission or the customer’s limited budget. It’s best to spend time trying to get the customer to see the error in the way they are thinking and educate them on what would be best and most effective over the long term.

This type of education is MUCH easier to do if you have discovered the customer’s interest in equipment versus you responding to a Request for Proposal. The most successful sellers of equipment are the reps who end each call with a simple question: “Are you thinking of purchasing any equipment in the near future?”

Education can be done using literature, demos or even taking your customer to visit a similar facility with equipment you have supplied and let them see the units at work.

Training

When you do sell equipment to your customer, have the equipment come into your facility, unbox it and assess it to be sure it was not damaged during shipping and is working properly. When you deliver the equipment to the end-user, NEVER assume they know how to use it! Be there and train their staff on proper usage and routine maintenance. Training also needs to be done repeatedly when staff turns over.

An example of how the lack of training has an impact is the first time I saw a CFR machine. It was stuck in the back of a storage closet with junk stacked on top of it and no one, from the head housekeeper to any staff member, knew what it was and how it worked!

Another example is when I showed a manufacturing facility how to restore their concrete floors after years of coats of finish had been applied whenever they wanted a shiny floor for VIP guests. Purchasing found the same items at a lower price, and I lost the sale. They did about 100 square feet of floor and stopped using the items because the supplier had no idea how to use them and train the staff. The customer was not pleased with the results. The maintenance staff was also not happy with the other vendor and did no more business with them.

Service

I like to tell my buyers that “while they both begin with ‘I’, there is a stark difference between ‘industrial’ and ‘indestructible.’” I will explain to them that a piece of floor equipment is like a car and needs to have routine maintenance done to get the most out of it.

For example, in addition to “daily” car maintenance (such as filling it up with fuel, cleaning the windshield, checking the tire pressure), it’s also important that service work is done by a trained technician to keep the car running at peak performance (such as oil changes, tire rotations, periodic inspections, and safety checks). I find explaining it this way makes it easy for the end-user to accept the importance of proper maintenance and service of floor care equipment.

If your company does not have the ability to service equipment, find a local authorized service center that will not sell to your end-user but be glad to take care of the service needs. They do exist, we have used them!

If this is a customer you have an ongoing sales relationship with, you should remind them of when they need to have the service done. A piece of equipment can be a great revenue generator, but it can also be a continuing strain in your relationship with the customer if it keeps breaking down due to misuse or lack of proper care.

In addition to selling wearable parts for equipment, if you have sold such equipment as part of a complete floor care program, that equipment can also become a “chemical dispenser” in many cases. To be sure that our chemicals get into the process if the customer is not already using them, we will often include in the quote a startup supply of what is needed for the proper floor care program to be implemented.

I know this article is not an exhaustive discussion of equipment sales. My intention for this article is to have you look at equipment sales as part of a bigger whole. Best of luck!

Beacon Distributors, Inc., founded in 1990, is based in Harrisville, RI. Our principal service area is a 50-mile radius from our location which takes in about 50 percent of the geography and 70 percent of the population of the Tristate area of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. We do have customers throughout the Northeast, and across the country. We offer a full jan/san selection of products as well as safety supplies and foodservice disposables. Working with our DPA partners, we are able to source virtually anything our customers want. Beacon is a full-service vendor for our customers, offering Vendor Managed Inventory, state-of-the-art online capabilities, equipment demos and service, dispenser installation, and end-user training. Visit beacondistributors.com.