The global construction industry is a lucrative market, with customer needs ranging from measuring products to sophisticated construction solutions. Hilti Corporation, the company featured at the beginning of this chapter, provides its customers around the world with leading-edge construction products and services with outstanding added value. Hilti prides itself for its direct sales model, which allows its salespeople and service teams to work directly with and for the customers.

Alim Hirani, an account manager for Hilti, adopts the relationship marketing approach in his selling strategy. He often starts his sales calls, which have been carefully preplanned, with icebreakers such as asking about the customer’s family rather than making the sales immediately. His sales presentations may take place in the client’s office or even at the construction site. Consequently, he must always plan well in advance the best way to make his sales presentations for specific sales calls. At all times, he must attempt to establish his own and his company’s credibility by demonstrating the premium value that Hilti’s products and services can offer his clients. Whenever possible, he tries to get the customer involved in product demonstration because seeing is believing. Once the customers see for themselves the benefits of Hilti’s product features, moving the customers from the investigation and evaluation stages to the action stage is just a procedure.

Alim sells not only individually but also as part of a team. For major clients who require a complete package of building/construction, mechanical/electrical, telecom, and interior finishing products and services, Alim works closely with his team members to make sure the information he acquires from the customer during initial contacts is made available to other salespeople and technical personnel of the team. In the construction industry, closing the sale is—most of the time—just the beginning. Well-trained product application specialists join Alim to offer the customers after-sales services, technical support, and training. (See the chapter opener and Reality Selling Today Role-Play 6 in Appendix 1 for more information.)