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A surprising number of goodwill flights seem to be flown, typically very quietly, to facilitate employee medical treatments.

Sales & Marketing Blitzes

Road Show

Ever been to Twinsburg, Ohio? Don’t want to? Never mind. If you really need window-making machines, Dick Dietrich will come to you, non-stop.

Dick Dietrich is the president of the Glass Equipment Development Corporation (GED) in Twinsburg, Ohio. The company “is an innovative and progressive machinery manufac-turer dedicated to the development of automated insulating glass fabrica-tion systems for the North American window and door industry.” If you can get excited about patented methods of applying hot melt butyl sealants and polyisobutylene, nobody does it better, or has more fun doing it, than GED.

For the last 10 years, Dietrich’s been taking advantage of business air-craft to make and sell window-making machines faster and better than any-one else. One way he accomplishes that is to hit several customers over several days in a coordinated sales and marketing blitz, which, Dietrich says, is an efficient use of his team’s time and an effective sales tool. The “team” often will consist of the vice president of sales and marketing, the sales man-ager, the regional sales rep, potentially someone from the engineering group and, occasionally, Dick (left) himself.
“Those are well-organized, quite specific shots at different customers. None of this just going down and talk-ing, ‘Say, hey! We’re a great company! Think about us!’ We’re well down the road on the selling process. We’re going in there to hammer on some-thing, or try to get a close or move somebody off a position,” he says.
“Not only does the airplane make certain trips doable,” he adds. “It makes us do it. In other words, if we didn’t have the plane, we probably wouldn’t do the selling team approach and we certainly wouldn’t be hitting several customers over several days.”
Business, and life, is tough enough without having to be grueling, Dietrich says. And the onerous nature of some trips is in itself a deterrent for many employees, so much so that, before the aircraft, the trip just wouldn’t happen.
“Particularly when you’re trying to get someone like myself involved,” Dietrich says. “I spent the 70s and 80s out on the road doing the hard selling.

I’ve been there and done that and I don’t want to do it any more. And yet I like going out and doing those kinds of things but it has to be palatable. If a guy says, ‘Hey, we’re going to jump on the airlines and switch and then fly to Nashville and then we’re going to drive down to Smyrna to call on somebody,’ then I’m going to say, ‘I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you go down and do that? And good luck. And if I can help, call me.’
　
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