by Kim Phelan

Joyce Lansdale’s first foray into industrial sales was selling white foam insulation to distributors and manufacturers in a five-state territory. A road warrior at the age of 23, she mapped out her calls for the week on Sunday nights – with paper maps – packed up her bag phone and laptop, and drove to visit customers Monday through Friday. Eating lonely meals in diners and mailing weekly call reports on a floppy disk to her employer were all part of the grit-building routine.

She’s come a long way since then. Today, she’s the vice president of industrial sales at Vallen, headquartered in Belmont, North Carolina, and, after mc’ing the April ISA24 annual meeting in Charlotte, she will serve as chair of the association. But those early days of struggle followed by doors of opportunity helped shape the talented problem-solver into a caring leader who thrives on helping others achieve success.

“People often ask me, ‘How did you get to where you are?’” Lansdale said. “You know, asteroids don’t fall out of the sky and, poof, you’re suddenly successful. I want young people to know that success in any component of your life is hard work. It’s getting out of your seat and showing up. And don’t be afraid to fail, because if you don’t fail you don’t learn. I was driving around selling white foam – there was nothing sexy about it. And every time I drove to a new customer, I didn’t know if they would be mean to me, if they would tell me to get lost, tell me they didn’t need anything. It was scary sometimes, but I learned to take risks, and I learned to do hard things. It helped me in my career.”

As lessons accumulated, her big career breakthrough occurred thanks to a customer while she was selling for a paper company that later became Georgia Pacific. He persuaded Lansdale to join his jan-san distribution company outside of metro Washington, D.C, with, as the saying goes, an offer she couldn’t refuse. Later, he brought her to Tri-State Electric, and then to Hagemeyer, a distributor that was later sold to Sonepar, which subsequently purchased IDG to merge with Hagemeyer, and the company rebranded as Vallen. Today, Vallen is owned by private equity.

“Lee Garrett is really responsible for giving me the foundation of what has become my career,” Lansdale said. “I got into this business because of Fort Howard paper company and then I stayed in this business because I was given an opportunity to really learn a skill that became transferable throughout the rest of my career.”

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

The skills to which Garrett introduced her are grounded in the principles of Aubrey Daniels’ “Performance Management,” a system described as a scientific approach to managing behavior, rooted in the field of behavior analysis. For Lansdale, it was game-changing, equipping her with tools to have the right kinds of conversations with salespeople that led to repeatably favorable outcomes.

“I am a textbook product and pupil of ‘Performance Management,’” she said. “Basically, you’re looking at your business and measuring what’s important, setting goals, and then providing feedback on a regular basis, that either reinforces behavior, continues behavior, or diminishes that behavior. You have to figure out how you want to organize your business and identify the performance that you’re looking for, and then organize the rest of the business so you can deliver on those variables.

“I’ve then been able to teach that to the people who report to me,” she continued. “Lee Garrett taught it to me, and he told me early in my career that it was my job to give it back once you master it. You invest in people and they become impactful to the business, but also, they take it with them throughout the course of their career. People who have come through my organization have been promoted or have left Vallen and are out in the marketplace doing really good things – taking what they’ve learned here and growing their careers and businesses, as well. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of: my influence on people in the business and helping grow them to be more successful financially.”

FROM SELLING TO MANAGING

Once portrayed as too pretty and too assertive by unkind female colleagues in a retail job right out of college, Lansdale laughs at the monikers today – especially in light of the servant leadership style she has adopted over the years. Slightly reminiscent of a well-known Psalm, she says she sees herself as a shepherd to her sales team, a guardian who “takes my flock to greener pastures . . . and when wolves or bad guys are out there, it’s my job to get rid of them or minimize them as best I can,” she said.

The transition from being a sales rock star to a management transplant isn’t always a smooth one. Lansdale said only about 5% of a salesperson’s skills are transferable to the role of sales manager, meaning the promotion of an ace sales rep to manager is often an epic failure. Lansdale attributes her successful navigation into sales coaching almost entirely to her Performance Management training.

In her first sales management position at age 29, she recalls having men report to her who were old enough to be her grandfather.

“Ed Parker, bless his soul, was a 70-year-old, kind gentleman. But I had to figure out how to isolate the variable that was preventing him from making his numbers and help him sell more stuff to his customers. Performance management really comes down to measurement and then recognition when they did what you wanted them to do.

“Now, if I had said, ‘Hey, Ed, why didn’t you hit your numbers this month?’ that probably wouldn’t have been very productive. When people are not doing what you need them to do, you have to be able to have the right conversation about what’s going on. Maybe they have a health problem; maybe there’s a problem at home; maybe they’re lacking the tools that they need to be successful; maybe they haven’t gotten the training that they needed; maybe there’s a gatekeeper who is a stumbling block.”

While her experience working in a male-dominated industry has been mostly positive, especially among bosses who “didn’t care that I was a girl,” Lansdale said she learned the trick to flipping the attitudes of gender-biased guys.

“When you’re working with folks who might not respect you initially, if you can give them the tools they need to be successful, if you can teach them something that they didn’t know before or give them an idea they can go and use, they stop being anti-girl or anti-Joyce or anti-whatever,” she said. “I mean, if you’re in sales, your goal is to sell more stuff, and if I help somebody do that, then eventually that badness goes away.”

SOLVING REAL PROBLEMS

The longer she worked for Vallen and its precursors, Lansdale began to recognize it offered opportunities for her to contribute tangible solutions for customers beyond mere products and applications. Comparing a company to potters’ clay, she says the ability to creatively mold and shape it has been among the most rewarding aspects of her tenure with Vallen and ultimately a key reason she has stayed for the last 20+ years.

From having developed a customer scorecard to crafting the process for managing national accounts, Lansdale can see her fingerprints on many initiatives that have become part of Vallen’s DNA. Another example: She helped develop a quarterly market report for customers that has evolved into a tool customers anticipate and rely upon.

“It really allows us to talk to our customers about what we’re seeing in the marketplace that’s going to impact their business,” she said. “It began in a very simple PowerPoint format – we would get information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other resources. Then we would consolidate it and report it to our customers. It started off small, but it’s grown and grown, and now it’s just part of what we do. I’ve become an accidental economist.”

With its characteristic customer-centric focus, Vallen is now on the cusp of solving a major problem for its customers, which are some of the most well-known (many Fortune 500) manufacturing firms in the U.S. whose industries range from transportation, automotive, and truck to petrochemical and pharmaceutical. Post- COVID, says Lansdale, customers have struggled to get their unplanned spend under control and are looking to Vallen for answers.

“From 50% to 60% of their spend is unplanned, meaning they didn’t know they needed it until they needed it,” she said. “And when that happens, everything kind of stops to a certain degree, and somebody has to go find that widget.

“Historically, we focused on planned spend – getting them the widget that they buy over and over again at a good price through a VMI location or managed from an integrated supply perspective. But it’s the unplanned spend that drives everybody crazy. Now, customers are saying, ‘Help me predict what I’m going to need based on what I’ve historically used before,’ which might be a year or two ago or it might be six months ago, but it’s not part of that planned spend.

“We’re focusing on how we utilize AI and use predictive analytics to help a customer better manage their unplanned spend,” she continued. “That’s what we’re innovating right now. We’re going to help them reduce that downtime, reduce that work – redundant work is waste in the land of Six Sigma. So, how do we help them reduce that waste and focus on making whatever it is that they make, so they’re not focused on finding widgets.”

THE ISA LIGHTBULB

Behind daily management activity and continuous contributions to Vallen’s financial growth, a backdrop of active participation with the Industrial Supply Association (ISA) has proved to be an advantage in Lansdale’s career. It was also the catalyst for a major creation at Vallen.

When the Women Industrial Supply Executives (W.I.S.E.) was launched in 2012 by ISA’s first female President/ Chair Kathleen Durbin, it quickly became a fortress of networking and professional support for many when it was still common for women to be one of few female execs in their companies.

Later rebranded as Women in Industry (WII), the networking group is designed to advance the development, influence, and inclusion of women within the industrial channel. Lansdale took the model and replicated it at the company when it was owned by Sonepar. At the request of President Chuck Delph, she and Senior Vice President of Enterprise Effectiveness (aka IT) Kim Garrett and Senior Vice President of Finance Sonia Timmons put together a new employee resource group (ERG) called “VICKIE,” Voices Inspiring Change, Knowledge, Innovation, and Empowerment. For this achievement, Vallen received ISA’s 2023 Innovation Impact Award.

“This wasn’t a Joyce thing, it was a Vallen thing,” she said. “Picking Vallen to win this award exemplifies that we as an association are leading the channel by example on diversity and inclusion.”

Over the next few years, the company created two more ERGs: BERG for Black employees and SALUTE for veteran team members. ERGs give employees an opportunity to volunteer and demonstrate leadership while planning career education and development for co-workers. The groups serve to enhance employee engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty, and they’ve proven to be helpful with recruiting people of diverse backgrounds, as well.

When Lansdale becomes ISA’s 2024 chair in July, she says she looks forward to reinforcing the progress she’s witnessed in the association. Mostly gone but not forgotten are the days when a male supplier rep would only speak to Lansdale’s male subordinates on the show floor, seemingly unable to grasp that a woman could be a distribution sales boss.

“We’ve come a long way in just 15 years,” she said. “My goal as chair will be to continue to support inclusion in the association, not from a push perspective, but from a lead-by-example perspective, and I’ll continue to help champion that throughout the organization.”

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