Mitch Taylor of 4 Office Automation has been selling successfully for 20 years.
Name: Mitch Taylor
Title: Sales Manager
Company: 4 Office Automation, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
Years in industry: 20 Years
New business revenue: $5 Million
Gross revenue: $15 million
Units placed: 1,000
What they’re saying about Mitch: “Mitch Taylor is a consistent performer year-in, year-out. He’s highly adept in understanding the nuances of complex negotiations and possesses cheese-melting persuasion. He’s well respected by his peers and considered as the pillar of the dealership.”
Sometimes tough luck is the best luck of all. After graduating from university with a degree in commerce, Mitch Taylor spent a few years working in distribution in Ottawa. Eventually he found himself looking for a new job. Because he wasn’t bi-lingual he had a difficult time finding a suitable position. Then one day he saw an ad in the Toronto Star for a sales position at 4 Office Automation. At that time he didn’t think of himself as a salesman, but as luck would have it, he made the call, was invited to Toronto, a four-hour drive from Ottawa, for an interview. After the interview he drove back to Ottawa, was called back for a second interview, made that four-hour drive again, was hired, and moved to Toronto to start his career selling office imaging technology.
That was 20 years ago. Today, Taylor is the sales manager of 4 Office Automation’s Ottawa office.
“I’ve sort of always been in sales even though you don’t always realize you’re selling sometimes,” acknowledges Taylor. “It’s the last thing I thought I’d do when I left university. I thought I’d be working in an office somewhere.”
After a year and a half working in Toronto, learning to sell, 4 Office opened an Ottawa office primarily because Panasonic, one of their vendors at the time, wasn’t well represented in that market. Taylor was offered the opportunity to move back to Ottawa and work in that office and he took it.
He says he eventually became sales manager by process of elimination, but it was also a lot of hard work. “I was the only rep they had in Ottawa so I sat in the manager’s office,” says Taylor. “Eventually we added more sales people and they said ‘why don’t you take that office’ and I did.”
Working in an industry that’s constantly evolving has been a revelation. “There’s always something new you can go back to your customer and say, ‘What about this? We can add onto your existing solution, do a refresh, or solve these problems you had before,’” he says. “Solutions are coming out daily and you can integrate them with various products whereas before I had one product to sell and that was it. Now we can add this app or that app and integrate it with this software on the backend. There’s so much more you can do nowadays.”
The toughest part of the job, or at least it was when Taylor first started in sales was handling rejection. He remains philosophical about what it’s like to work in sales. “You lose today, but tomorrow you’re going to win,” he says. “I’ve been lucky, I usually win a lot more than I lose, and the ones I win are big.”
He remembers his first sale to a small roofing company in Mississauga, Ontario. “I sold them a used fax machine and a used Panasonic photocopier and when I came back to the office it felt like I had made a $3-million sale,” says Taylor.
He’s taken down many large deals over the years, including a few in the $7-$8 million range. Taylor recently won a thousand machine deal for a school board that’s been his account since 2000. It’s the fourth time he’s won that business. This time they didn’t even ask for a demo. “You build a reputation with clients and they know you’re looking out for their best interests and that you’re going to take care of them,” says Taylor.
Asked why he’s been so successful, Taylor replies, “I believe in what I sell and what I’m doing. If I don’t think it’s a good solution for the customer I’m not comfortable selling it. I’ve been fortunate to have products that make it easy to sell because I can stand behind them.”
The advice he always shares with new sales reps is “Calls equal dollars. If you don’t make calls you’re not going to succeed.”
He recalls some words of wisdom he received years ago from one of his first sales managers and that is that everybody has to make money.
“If you give products away you’re not going to be around; at the same time, you can’t make too much money on a particular deal,” states Taylor. “You can sell one product at $2,000 or 10 at $1,600, which would you rather do? Then you go in and expand those ten customers to other things and sometimes get referrals from that.”
His biggest challenge of late is finding good sales people. “Nothing against kids coming out of school, but what we see from them is they want the job title, they want the money, and they want the promotions, but they’re not interested in putting in the hours and staying late to work on a proposal. It’s ‘No. Time out, I’m going drinking with the boys or to play hockey or whatever.’ Do I work late every night, no, but when I need to I do.”
From his experience this is especially critical early on in one’s career. “There’s a lot of ramp up to build your connections and your territory. We try to have our reps be like farmers; they don’t have a huge territory and continue to work that territory. Eventually they’ll walk in and the prospect will say, ‘You’re still there? We’ve had four Canon reps during that same time, but you’re still there.’ That’s what we try to get our reps to do. A lot of younger people want the instant gratification, but don’t want to take the three years to build up to it.”
He occasionally gets frustrated when he thinks about how much money dealerships like 4 Office Automation invest in a new rep only to have them leave after a year or two. “In our industry you can make a lot of money if you work at it,” opines Taylor.
And that’s something that Taylor has done and continues to do and why he is one of the industry’s top sales people.
