Bag the Elephant!

[zooz]

Bag the Elephant! / Steve Kaplan

Published in The Marker Magazine, February 2007, written by Ari Manor.


Steve Kaplan specializes in Sales and Marketing for huge corporations, which he calls “elephants”. Corporations, he explains, are huge, clumsy and slow, strong, smart, and have a long memory, just like elephants. Therefore, when you work with them you have to treat them with much care and respect, since they are not easy to please. However, whoever does succeed in pleasing them will be greatly rewarded. In fact, Kaplan thinks that focusing on elephants very much increases one’s chances of succeeding in business: it is easier to succeed when you sell to a small number of large customers than if you sell to a large number of small customers.



Steve Kaplan loves his “elephants” and knows them well. The first elephant he hunted, P & G, helped the sales promotion firm that he managed, Bounty SCA, grow from sales of $200,000 to sales of 250 million dollars within 10 years. Throughout the years Kaplan successfully sold to more than 100 elephants, including AOL, Citibank, Ford, Nestle, and Unilever. In his book, Bag the Elephant!, Kaplan reveals how to systematically pursue elephants, and shares secrets and tools with the reader that enable him to dance with elephants.



A fundamental principle he mentions in his book is that you must communicate with elephants in their own language, which among other things contains forms and procedures, For example, when Steve wanted to impress the procurement team at P&G, he developed a special form that showed them how much they cumulatively saved on their annual orders from his company (compared to the regular prices they paid elsewhere). In another example, when Kaplan experienced a malfunction in product supply, he hurried to report to his elephant a new QA process he developed and implemented in his company to prevent similar mishaps in the future. At the time, his company was still too small to implement QA procedures, but the elephant felt he was being treated seriously and that the small company was learning lessons, and so he remained a loyal customer.



Another important principle detailed in the book is how a supplier can take advantage of a corporation’s bureaucracy. It turns out that the managers working in a corporation also hate internal bureaucracy. A smart supplier can make it easier for the managers to work with him and gain their gratitude. For example, submitting proposals in the corporation’s accepted format (so that a manager will not have to reformat the proposal); taking responsibility and obtaining authorizations from other departments (and thereby making contacts with additional departments and saving work for the initial manager); clarifying payment delays directly with the Finance Department (to spare the manager that requisitioned the work the headache of dealing with it).



The book Bag the Elephant! contains many additional tips, and describes proven methods of locating and contacting key people, compatibility between different types of salespeople and different types of elephants, conducting negotiations with the corporation, proper pricing of proposals, recruiting supporters, and working correctly and expanding sales with the various departments in the corporation. This is a very easy to read and informative book that is a practical guide to pursuing elephants. So if you are already trying to sell to elephants in Israel or abroad, or if you want to learn how you can profit from a small number of large customers, this is the book for you. In fact, this is such a successful book that this bookworm contemplated keeping it a secret all to himself….

Enjoy your reading!
Adi Golan