The  bottom line in any business is profit. That’s just the way it is in our capitalist system. Money has always been a good incentive to excel, and always will be. The J&L sales department could arguably be called the Most Important part of the company. Without sales, what is there? But selling a product took much organization, and many people.

The salespeople who had direct contact with our customers were called “Outside Sales”, as they were located in major cities around the country, and overseas as well. Some of these people were on the company payroll as employees, but many worked for independent machine tool distributors. Their pay was based on a commission percentage of sales. A machine tool distributor essentially sold a variety of machinery, with the J&L product line only one part of their lineup. It’s basically similar to the local new car dealership: the dealership is not an employee of the car company, but works under contract, being paid a commission from them based on sales performance.

The “Inside Sales” people were the ones located at the factory; they were basically the contact between outside sales and the sales engineers who prepared the quotes. They did quite a bit of travelling to customer locations, and the longer a person held this job, the more “customer contacts” they usually had. They also entertained the customer when visiting J&L.

When a request comes in from a customer, it is routed to the “Sales Engineer” for review; if the requested machine is straightforward (I.E. no special requirements), it can be quoted after reviewing the machine build backlog and determining delivery time. But this type of quote was rare; most customer requests involved some sort of difficulty. There may be a customer spec that had to be adhered to. These could be very complex, requiring collaboration with the product engineering department (both electrical and mechanical). Time and material costs had to be calculated. There would likely be an “extra charge” for the customer. Many of our customers were automotive type businesses (Ford, John Deere, and Caterpillar as examples). Many of these companies had several plants located around the country; and sometimes each plant had its own standard. J&L strived to comply to these requests, sometimes at no additional cost, to get the order.

Quite often the “Customer Specs” were composed of hundreds of pages, and a thorough review was impossible; J&L might take exception to certain parts, but we always had to defend our position. Sometimes it was best just to “No Quote” because the complexity was just too great. Of course, it all depended on how big our machine backlog was; were we “hungry” for work? Sometimes that hunger got us in trouble………..