Strengthening the Sales Core

Like an athlete in training, industrial distributors have to hone many “muscle groups” to build a sales organization that functions at peak performance – and it’s never a one-and-done regimen. At Kimball Midwest, a multi-location industrial distributor headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, aligning people, processes, and technologies is accomplished through a homegrown, field-tested, and time-proven system that consistently produces sales expansion for the company and income growth for its 1,400-strong sales team. The absolute behind the results: embracing and adhering to the company’s proprietary system.

“As a family business, we want to make sure we’ve wrapped our arms around the members of our sales team and make sure they understand there are people and programs here to support them,” said President Patrick McCurdy III, the third-generation of leadership at Kimball Midwest. “Our ask is that you take the time to embrace them. And when we do that together, we have our best outcomes.”

Patrick McCurdy III

Keeping score matters, and the company naturally measures sales success in the expected way of tracking volume and dollars; but they also measure themselves in skills development, growth of customer relationships, value created for customers, as well as the tenure of their sales team. And they’re not exaggerating when they talk about the critical importance of seeing associates grow their incomes and build their careers.

Another key indicator of how this distributor’s sales organization is actually performing showed up this summer when Kimball Midwest was named among Selling Power magazine’s 60 Best Companies to Sell For – for the eighth consecutive year. They were evaluated by a research team that looked at, among other things, training, hiring, onboarding, and compensation, and while the list was not ranked this year, Kimball Midwest has placed as high as 19th in previous years.

It’s not the only accolades Kimball Midwest has received over the past year. Last October, for the third straight year, the distributor was one of 59 organizations honored by the Chief Learning Officer’s 13th LearningElite Awards program, appearing alongside organizations including Cleveland Clinic Health System, Dell and Johnson & Johnson. In February 2024, Kimball Midwest also was named among 105 winners of Training magazine’s 2024 Training APEX Awards.

With training coming under Selling Power’s scrutiny as a main driver of sales excellence, the recognition Kimball Midwest has garnered in this area signals that something important is occurring within the core of this company.

1 SUCCESS DISCIPLINE:

Top Notch Training. Most of what Kimball Midwest does with sales training has been built internally and is executed between its own training leadership and its expert sales veterans who have outstanding track records from which to illustrate best practices. According to McCurdy, associates who come to work at the company have a major advantage.

“You get to start on third base, because others before you created this environment and culture,” he said. “We’ve been fortunate that a lot of our programs were developed because of the experience that our sales team has had, and we’ve really had leaders from within who step forward to demonstrate what they’re doing,” said McCurdy. “It reinforces the training content that’s been created in our own space. There have been a few times we’ve had outside people come in to the organization, including the late Tim Kight and his Focus 3 curriculum. But on the whole, we’ve been successful with internally developing great sales leadership and training leadership, which is a testament to the people in the organization and their willingness to share and help others.”

Where training is concerned, content is king, and Kimball Midwest focuses heavily on its repeatable system of clear customer communication.

“We instill into our sales force how to show customers the difference between our

Steve Thompson presents at a company sales event.

value-based approach and other competitors in the market,” said General Sales Manager Steve Thompson. “We spend a lot of time helping communicate the value of our products, and typically that’s done through our service and through our demonstrations. We really want customers to understand how our products are going to perform better, and we feel the best way is by showing them through a demonstration. We also do a lot of value-added services – things we do to help our customers’ shop increase their uptime.”

The hard or tangible skills of knowing and showing product is coupled with an emphasis on the soft skills of sales: making strong connections with the customer, making them feel valued, and providing value for them – it’s all part of the system, much of which is conducted through online training programs. But the distributor also subscribes to the good old fashioned “riding shotgun” approach to sales management. Prior to the pandemic, the company placed a high priority on sales managers making calls with associates, especially with new hires – and the practice is still valued although executed with less frequency today.

2 SUCCESS DISCIPLINE:

Hiring. In the present labor market, making great hires is easier said than done. The company leans into a skilled in-house recruiting team that partners closely with sales managers, and they concentrate on attracting industry-leading sales professionals.

“Being a family-owned and operated company really puts us in a unique position that we can support our sales reps, said Thompson. “Many we’ve hired have felt underappreciated in their former environments, and we’ve been able to support their growth. The biggest thing we look at is how we can help them and their families by maximizing their incomes.”

What does being a family-owned distributor have to do with hiring success?

“I think it has everything to do with it, and it was probably one of the major reasons why I came to Kimball Midwest,” Thompson continued. “I had worked for a publicly-traded company where things were changing from quarter to quarter, and a lot of times decisions were made based on what’s best for the shareholder. I believe being a family business, we’re really looking at things in the long term. How are we going to build the right customers, the right sales reps, the right leaders. Instead of going for quarter-to-quarter shareholder growth, we’re focused on the growth of the team, our people.”

Stereotypes about salespeople are common, and in reality, many do have strong self-confidence (aka egos) fueled with determination and competitiveness – but also a desire to serve and solve problems. Personalities can be large, but at Kimball Midwest the pattern leans toward helpfulness, kindness, and even humility, says Thompson.

“I’m looking for people who are passionate about what they do, committed to getting results, and typically they’re going to have a body of work that shows success through their previous sales experience,” said Thompson. “In terms of personality traits, a lot of it is being self-motivated, willing to be coachable and teachable, but also highly entrepreneurial – somebody who values their customer and thinks how they can best support and serve them; somebody who’s adaptable to any situation.

“I always like to find out what challenging things they’ve overcome in their lives and how they’ve done it,” he added. “That really tells me a lot about the character and life skills that would transfer into job skills with them.”

3 SUCCESS DISCIPLINE:

Onboarding. According to McCurdy, culture is what sets Kimball Midwest apart and defines the onboarding process. An unhurried, well-planned process is aimed at showing new hires the company believes in them and wants them to stay; and the company supplies both tools and a runway that will support their financial success.

“We introduce them to who we are as a company – our vision, our values, our behaviors, how we live,” he said. “We then provide a lot of good online sales tools and training. We have a class where our reps start and learn the basics. That’s followed up by reps getting out in the field with their manager to learn the best practices; we invest a lot of time in making sure that our reps and our managers are doing those best practices together, shoulder to shoulder, and building those relationships with each other and with customers.

“The beliefs and behaviors of our people will determine the performance of our business,” he added, “and ultimately, that’s what we’re trying to support with all these programs and structures.”

Many McCurdy family members serve in roles at Kimball Midwest, including, left to right: Michael (account representative manager), Dave (chief operating officer), Pat (chief executive officer), Brendan S. (business development manager), Meaghan (director of corporate responsibility), Patrick (president), Connor (manager in training) and Brendan R. (associate director of supply chain management). Several others also work in the business.

4 SUCCESS DISCIPLINE:

Compensation. The glue that seals all the other disciplines of a winning sales organization, monetary rewards at Kimball Midwest are carefully structured but not publicly detailed. The distributor has created a program that clearly communicates goals, supports the rep with tools to achieve them, and ties generous incentives to performance. And the underlying system propagated through its veteran salespeople and inhouse trainers is an ever-present foundation.

“It’s a combination of following our processes and programs and getting rewarded,” Thompson said. “In sales, it takes one or two years before you build a territory, so we look at incentivizing those right behaviors that are really going to lead to great, long-term outcomes – the end game is for each person to have a highly successful career where they’re earning what they worth.”

Although the secrets of its success formula are proprietary, Thompson shared one key fundamental.

“The biggest thing we focus on is making sales calls – getting that repetition,” he said. “So, we measure the number of calls and the number of demonstrations that the rep does; are they doing that on a consistent basis. That’s a big part of the special sauce in our system that we consistently practice.”