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Sandridge Food sells products like pasta and chicken salad to Tops, Giant Eagle, Kroger's, etc. While Mark Sandridge says their closing rate is much better now because of the techniques Sales Concepts worked with them on, there is an interesting story that just evolved. Almost a contrarian story.

Sandridge was recently considering buying an east coast company owned by Perdue Corporation (the chicken company). Deluca is a small manufacturer of Italian entrees like lasagna.

The things I learned from Sales Concepts positioned us to make an informed decision to not buy the company. Al Strauss told me to first of all get an up front contract. The Perdue people initially told us that after the sale they wanted to buy products from Deluca in the future and that they could buy a lot of Sandridge's products.

Perdue's lead people went on to say that Jim Perdue is behind the project. Traditionally, we would go to visit the Connecticut company but Sales Concepts taught me otherwise. I immediately asked when Jim Perdue was coming to Medina to visit us. I knew if he did, it would show sincere intent. A few weeks ago Jim Perdue and 4 of his senior VP's came to our place in Medina.

Another thing I asked for up front was to be able to visit their current customer base to gauge if they would continue to buy products from Deluca after we bought the company. Again, part of the up front contract Al suggested.

Three weeks ago I started visiting customers. Remember, normal practice would be to take the sales numbers at face value. I found out that many of the customers would not continue to buy from Deluca to the extent that sales would be about 50% of what was on paper!

In the first meeting we ever had, Al's suggestion to ask for certain things in our discovery were critical in helping us not buy a company that would have ultimately been a huge financial mistake.

Sometimes the best deals are those not made. Al taught us that there are no questions you can't ask and the minute we emotionally felt we had a question but didn't have the right to ask we put those emotions aside, asked the question, and we got the answer every time we asked.

If I hadn't used Sales Concepts techniques I would have taken Perdue's word the sales were going to be there, that they would work with me in the future and buy Sandridge products. I would have spent all the money, gotten to Connecticut and had no sales.