Business Operations

Today, exceeding customer expectations has become increasingly difficult. Customers expect immediate information about their orders, personal engagement, and more.

The Western Red Cedar Lumber Association represents a significant portion of North America’s WRC manufacturers, distributors and retailers, and supports their members’ business through programs including advocacy, education, and advertising and marketing; of which social media has been playing an increasingly bigger role.

My big break came in the second half of last year, after running into some employees of Canadian Wood Products whom I met at Global Buyers Mission 2016. Those connections landed me an audience with the company’s senior officials soon after.

Being too pushy is the number one fear of underachieving salespeople. Because they are so afraid of being pushy, they don’t push at all.

Sales is a relationship business and we, as salespeople, are the yang of that relationship. The customer’s job is to come up with reasons to wait, to think about it and to analyze the all the possibilities. Our job is to have the spirit of the possible, now. We are here to help our customers figure out a way that what we are proposing will work.

Recently, a lumber distributor, struggling to attract and keep qualified talent, asked how to get his employees more engaged and energized. His assessment was that they were not motivated, were not “giving it their all,” and his recent efforts to put in place a bonus incentive program had done little to change any of that. Sound familiar?

Pacific Woodtech Corp. is a mega-producer of engineered wood products that many have not come across—or have you? It has been producing laminated veneer lumber and I-joists with others’ names on them for about 20 years—until recently.

Fear costs us salespeople a lot of money. Fear is the reason we don’t pick up the phone to call our customer proactively, when there is nothing urgent or terrible happening.

Here are answers to common questions about the EPA’s regulation on wood-based products from Steve Zylkowski, director of Quality Services for APA – The Engineered Wood Association.