Nobody Wants a Half-Inch Drillbit

AA Electric ensures long-term business success by focusing on solutions and relationship-building.

Wayne DeLong was taught early on in his career to be the solutions guy, to figure out what customers were trying to accomplish, not what he wanted them to buy.

“Starting out in the early 70s I had an older, wiser co-worker who was trying to teach me the secret to sales. He pulled me aside and said, ‘Nobody wants a half-inch drill bit. They want a half-inch hole.’ I never forgot that. You need to be the solutions guy. Lots of people say they are all that, but most aren’t really,” DeLong said.

DeLong is the branch manager and an applications engineer for AA Electric in Lawrenceville, Georgia. During his 50-year career, he has consistently incorporated that solution-selling idea into the company’s overall approach to customers.

AA Electric is a 60-year-plus, family-owned company with over 200 years of combined in-house engineering experience and more than 50 product lines available. The company has locations in Georgia, Florida, and New Jersey.

“We don’t want to just sell the product. We want to be the guys you want to call when you want to do something and you don’t know how,” he said. “It’s especially important as we look to build relationships with the younger engineers. These people are very bright, but also benefit from our experience.”

“We get right alongside them on a challenge and ask them what they are trying to accomplish. Then we work with them to write a sample program, find what works and we let them be the hero. You do that three or four times, now you’ve got a customer for decades.”

Building trust in a relationship early on, helping the customer find the answers, and not being simply transactional—DeLong says those are the keys to growing a business with an engineer for the long term.

“Once they see we are there to help them, we can show them what they are capable of, and they just take off. There’s tremendous value in that,” DeLong said. “Our engineers start off in a teacher-student relationship. But if we do our jobs right, the next thing you know, we’re learning from each other. It becomes a peer-to-peer relationship that helps us understand their industry better. That makes us smarter, and we can build our knowledge banks. Then we become more valuable for all our customers.”

“Everything we do evolves around the customer relationship,” he added. We don’t necessarily care about the order in the moment. We’re trying to help them so well that they are making orders 30 years from now.”

A big part of helping the customer is staying current on the latest technologies. AA Electric’s relationship with Yaskawa has been critical in keeping its team on top of market trends and developments.

“I’ve been enamored of Yaskawa for quite some time,” DeLong said. “They have a great quality product line. They’re always looking ahead.”

“Look at the GA500. I was jaded when they came out with that drive because, you know, it’s like you’ve seen all you can do with a drive already.  So, you get this email and you’re wondering what they could do that hasn’t been done already?”

“But I started looking into the product announcement and realized they had incorporated some thoughtful features into this product. Yaskawa does its homework – and this drive is no exception. There are features in there everyone has, but not everyone has put them into one Microdrive. Yaskawa is very considerate in its innovation process. This is the kind of thinking we can bring to our customers.”

To ensure users understand the impact of leading innovations, AA Electric invests a lot of time and energy into training customers, both young and experienced engineers.

“A lot of people can be afraid of new technology, like a GA500,” DeLong said. “We do a lot of training classes for our customers. When we train on Yaskawa products, I tell customers ‘Hey, I’d like to tell you we’ve made the class really hard this morning, but we’re about to do 6th grade science and 8th grade math today.’ If you familiarize them with the product and train them well, the fear disappears.

“Yaskawa products are easy to teach. And the company makes it easier by always teaching us and being willing to help us teach others, if we need it.”

DeLong said building customer relationships requires working closely with customers, supporting them, learning from each other, and not focusing on the order. 

“There is nothing more important than giving the customers the solution. Helping them get that theoretical half-inch hole they want. Otherwise, they may go to someone else,” he said. “Always be thinking about the hole – not the drill bit,” he said.