The Hytrol Story

1970 began with more employees added to the Hytrol family. The company was experiencing steady growth now and with that came the need for additional help in the sales department at St. Louis, and the engineering and production groups in Jonesboro. The distributor network also continued to expand with the addition of more firms throughout the United States. Hytrol holds an “annual meeting” every January where all directors, management, and the company team leaders and supervisors meet to discuss their plans for the year. During the 1970 meeting, held in Memphis, Sam presented his sales plan and promotion idea which he dubbed “Five-in-Five.” He proposed that the Hytrol sales department was going to shoot for $5 million in five years. Tom, Chuck, and Ralph expressed their skepticism. But Sam persisted that his prediction was based on the annual percentage growth from the previous years. Sales went right to work with this promotion. With Hytrol’s policy of only selling through its distributors, the only way for Hytrol to continue to increase sales was to help the distributors increase sales. And with the growing distributor network, many of the firms had employees who were only vaguely familiar with Hytrol’s product line. Sam knew that in order to help the distributors increase sales, an education program would have to be initiated. Years before, when Sam was with Colson, one of his responsibilities was to help train all their salesmen. Colson was a large company and had salesmen all over the country. To help teach them about conveyors, Sam wrote a special book. It was very elementary, and read not unlike a grade school primer. He called it the A-B-C Conveyor Book. After he came to work for Hytrol, Sam and Tom sat down and rewrote the book. Tom added drawings and diagrams to help illustrate the various parts and workings of the basic conveyors. This book had become a very popular instructional tool for those who were just coming in to the conveyor business. With the A-B-C Book and Hytrol’s simply designed conveyor line, new salesmen could soon understand just how conveyors worked. But there were a lot of other things sellers of Hytrol needed to know in order to become proficient salesmen. Therefore, being a firm believer in education and training, Sam went to Tom and made a new proposal. He wanted to start a series of Basic Conveyor Sales Schools. Each school would have 16 c h a n g e s a n d t r a n s i t i o n s