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The World's Greatest Salesman

November 5, 2004 - by Robert E. Stevens, GENESIS II (The Second Beginning) E-Mail: views@aol.com

I have just finished reading a book by Lou Pritchett, Stop Paddling & Start Rocking the Boat. Lou is a former Vice President of Sales for Procter & Gamble. Unfortunately, I only had a few of years to work with Lou. We both retired early and at about the same time. I highly recommend this book to anyone in corporate management and/or sales. Lou was the most innovative person I had met in my 39 years at Procter.

While Lou had many great achievements at P&G, His greatest involved taking a $400 million customer and forming a partnership where within a few years that customer became an annual $6 billion dollar customer. Think about it, P&G was approximately a $35 billion dollar sales company at that time and this one company accounted for 15% of the sales. Very early Lou recognized the potential of Wal*Mart. Sam Walton and Lou formed a personal relationship that led to the partnership of the two companies. Today both companies are reaping the benefits of the vision, efforts, and creativity of these two individuals.

From my perspective the increase in business was not the major achievement. Consider the task facing Lou. He was working with a retailer in Bentonville, Arkansas. No P&G executive had ever called on anyone at Wal*Mart. Lou was the first to make any contact whatsoever. Only P&G sales people had called on Wal*Mart and as anyone in retail knows, P&G sales people were (to put it mildly) hated. As the deal was about to be closed, there was a meeting scheduled in Bentonville. I have been told that Mr. Smale, P&G CEO had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the meeting. The real achievement was getting these two companies of entirely different cultures and personalities to come together to form a partnership. It was a clash of style, beliefs and cultures. No wonder Sam Walton called Lou Pritchett the "World's Greatest Salesman."

The above was just one of Mr. Pritchett's many achievements, but the greatest. Lou was and still is a true visionary, innovator, and a person who understands human nature. But all this is not without a price. You will not find it in his book but his fight to achieve change in a large bureaucracy with so many small empires took a terrible toll on his health. One morning, his wife found him unconscious in the bathroom. He had lost four pints of blood from a bleeding ulcer. Lou was hospitalized and missed three months of work. Sixteen months later Lou retired. He said that "boat rockers, mavericks, change agents, and plain old employees who try to tell management what they don't want to hear are rarely welcome within the corporate bosom."

His book is loaded with great advice, but it can be hazardous to your health. Lou sent me an autographed copy of his book with some very fine words about our work written on the first page. Another P&Ger who left at about the same time as Lou and I was Mr. Robert Herbold. He took the COO position at MicroSoft. Bob has written a book soon to be released titled, The Fiefdom Syndrom. I look forward to his view of management cultures.

Lou's book reminds me of Wayne Calloway's advice. (Wayne is the former CEO of Pepsi.) Wayne stated, "If it ain't broke, fix it anyway. The test of management is the nerve to change." It's called staying ahead of competition.

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