With their name at stake, the Melanis have put the promise of customer service at the center of their marketing and built themselves into a home improvement brand. They’ve also fostered a style of managing people as individuals, which makes for loyalty, productivity, and good morale and which translates to a healthy relationship between salespeople, installers, and customers.
“Ray Melani would agree that he’s no more important than a confirmer,” Menendez says. “Our employees don’t work for someone, they work with someone.”
Making room for talented professionals in their employ required the owners to manage not as my-way-or-the-highway heavies, but as hardworking peers who pay a lot of attention to what’s going on. “People’s eyes get big when they see the boss, who’s supposed to be partying in Florida, working 10 hours a day,” notes Bill Sherwood, sales manager for the sunroom division.
SALESFORCE STABILITY Melani Bros. holds sales meetings every Tuesday and Friday. Sales manager Sherwood — who closed a half million dollars worth of business last year and claims to spend $700 a month feeding the 14-person salesforce — wants to ramp up 2007 sales, which are slightly behind those of 2006. Sherwood thinks he knows why: complacency. “We’re used to high levels of success,” he says. “But what happens when that level becomes the status quo? What we need is a catalyst.”
Melani Bros. has been able to enjoy remarkable salesforce stability, and despite Sherwood’s dissatisfaction with current performance, overall five-year growth of more than 20%.
While many companies, especially those with high-value products such as sunrooms, debate the idea of two-step closing — measure-call first, close on the second appointment — Melani Bros. plans to stick to its 10-step selling system and the one-call close.
The key to making that work is systems that ensure multiple points of contact with the customer to “keep continuing the sale” by repeated communications: first, a welcome call from Megan Melani, Ron Melani’s daughter (see “Bread and Butter,” page 58); then a visit from a project manager who remeasures; next, a pre-construction conference (at least for sunrooms).
Customers need to know what they’re getting, and the company needs to know that those expectations are being met. “When we get their agreement, that contract is a proposal filled with doubt,” Ray points out. “Do they really want the product? Can they afford the product? The opportunity that you, as a company, have is to remove that doubt.”
FULL CIRCLE As of this month, Melani Bros. is back in big-box SFI marketing with demonstrators and kiosks in 21 The Home Depot stores throughout Virginia, courtesy of a program set up for its dealer network by TEMO. The Melani Bros. Web site just began featuring an interactive component, where customer service department personnel can field inquiries, live via e-mail, during business hours. (See “Chat Me Up,” page 56.) The effort to broaden the product menu continues apace, with the company’s gutter protection business — a separate division, with its own marketing and sales — aiming to double in volume this year.
The Melanis see siding becoming 15% of business, and window replacement tripling in five years to $15 million in sales. The Melanis are at pains to explain that theirs is a “make market” company. That is, it doesn’t so much satisfy an existing need as create one with its marketing, then fill it with its sales effort. Last year the company used a combination of sweepstakes, show and event marketing, direct mail, mall displays, canvassing, and its presence in Sam’s Club warehouses to generate the thousand inquiries a week it needs to not only sustain its lead flow but build a pipeline of future prospects by adding the names of some 54,000 interested parties who sign up for its sweepstakes program to its database.
