FINDING NEW WAYS TO SELL MORE Smart companies are listening better, broadening their product lines, exploring new markets, and generally trying to make themselves invaluable to their customers.
By Susan Caminiti REPORTER ASSOCIATE Catherine Guthrie

(FORTUNE Magazine) – WHILE MUCH of corporate America tries to do business with less -- less money, fewer employees, fewer customers -- a few renegades have begun to ask: How can I sell more? ''Companies are coming to realize that they can only shrink themselves into profitability for so long,'' says David Nadler, president of Delta Consulting Group in New York City. ''Controlling costs will always be important, but at some point you have to start growing the business again.'' Unfortunately, there aren't any shortcuts to easy growth. Companies that want to sell more in the go-slow Nineties will have to do it the old-fashioned way, only more so: by learning as never before what customers -- both the corporate kind and the kind like you and me -- really want, and then figuring out better ways of delivering it. ''Forget about selling to the customer,'' says Stephen Heiman, co-founder of Miller Heiman, a sales consulting firm in Reno, Nevada. ''Think instead of becoming part of that customer's organization and contributing to his success.'' For apparel maker VF Corp., the strategy involves aggressively expanding a popular clothing line -- Lee jeans -- into other categories. Nike and Lever Brothers are seeking out new audiences and product niches. Other companies, such as Baxter International, are forging powerful links with their corporate customers by making it ever easier to do business. All this activity comes at a time when customers want to do business with fewer, not more, suppliers. It doesn't take the geniuses in accounting to figure out that your company needs to be among the chosen few. Here's how to make sure you are:

-- BROADEN BRANDS. VF has a strong and popular product in its Lee jeans. It also has strong and popular competitors in Levi Strauss and the Gap. The dilemma: how to sell more of a valuable brand when rivals take very big bites. Lee President Timothy Lambeth's approach was to stop thinking of Lee as just a player in the jeans business. He also wanted to attach the Lee label to casual pants, tops, and sweaters for men, women, and children. That's the proposal the $2.9-billion-a-year clothing maker took to some of the country's biggest retailers, hoping to persuade them to display the company's expanded line in large, splashy Lee megabrand departments. James Maginness, merchandise manager for women's casual sportswear at J.C. Penney, says the retailer started testing the Lee megabrand in six of its stores last October. ''This stuff just flew out of the stores,'' he says of the clothing, priced from $14 for a T-shirt to $38 for jeans. ''Lee is such a popular brand with shoppers, and that has translated well into other items. Customers accept the new offerings because they identify with the Lee name.'' Maginness says his Lee business has doubled since October. This year VF hopes to expand to 50 more stores in other retailers, including Mercantile and Belk.

-- LOOK FOR NEW AUDIENCES. Women account for just 15% of Nike's $3 billion in annual sales. Thomas Clark, general manager of the Nike brand, aims to double that number by 1995. The company realized that going after a bigger piece of the women's market would involve a different kind of marketing. For example, says Susan Schoonover, marketing manager for women's fitness apparel at Nike, ''a store trying to sell women's athletic wear needs a dressing room. Most sporting goods stores have only a little room with a tiny curtain in front.'' Nike now has a team of merchandisers who work directly with retailers to figure out what changes should be made to sell more to women. The company is also reaching out to women with special ads. That's because women pay about as much attention to Michael Jordan plugging his Air Jordans as they do to the play-by-play of Monday night football. ''Most women don't really connect with one athlete for his or her achievements,'' says Schoonover. ''They admire someone who has been able to pull it all together in her own life, and that's what we tried to convey in the original ads.'' A new set of ads discusses how women feel about their bodies. ''You are not a goddess,'' reads the copy for Nike's Air Essential walking shoes, ''and most likely you will never be a goddess but just because you are human that doesn't mean we can't worship the ground you walk on.'' The ads have a toll-free number at the bottom for customers who want more information about where to find the products. Since January, Schoonover says, Nike has received 100,000 calls. Not all are about the merchandise. ''Some women really identify with the message in the ads and want to get a copy to hang in their office or send to their daughters.''

-- FIND A NEW NICHE. Yes, it can be done, even in a business as mature as soap. Look at what Lever Brothers has accomplished with Lever 2000. The company, long a laggard behind competition killer Procter & Gamble, has lathered itself into the No. 1 position in the soap category by touting Lever 2000 as a multipurpose product for the whole family. Forget about buying a moisturizing soap for Mom, a deodorizing bar for Dad, and a mild one for the kids. Lever claims it is the first company to successfully combine all those cleansing qualities into one fresh-smelling bar. Lever 2000, whose mildly racy TV ads demonstrate the soap's ability to clean ''all 2000 body parts,'' had sales of $113 million last year, pushing the company ahead of P&G in toilet soap revenue for the first time. Lever, which also makes Dove, Caress, and Lifebuoy, grabbed 35% of the $1.6-billion-a-year market, vs. 32% for P&G's Ivory, Zest, Safeguard, Coast, and Camay brands. While CEO David Webb says that he is ''delighted with the success of Lever 2000,'' he attributes its success to business practices that he has followed for over 40 years. ''Don't let anyone kid you by saying that selling more today is different from in the 1950s. The key to success has always been and will always be making a better product.''

-- REPOSITION YOURSELF. Put another way, try to see yourself through your customers' eyes. ChemLawn learned this lesson the hard way. Since the 1970s, the $355-million-a-year Columbus, Ohio, company had practically owned the market in commercial lawn maintenance. Then about three years ago competition cropped up, in the form of smaller lawn care companies such as Orkin and Barefoot. ChemLawn figured it had to start selling something the upstarts weren't. ''For so many years we simply told customers what we had to offer,'' says David Mulbarger, vice president of sales. ''Now we had to find out what they wanted.'' In May 1991, ChemLawn convened an all-day meeting of its largest commercial customers. The company was surprised to learn that they did not regard ChemLawn as a total lawn care provider. Sure, clients hired ChemLawn to maintain their grass, but they often turned to smaller firms for the rest of their landscaping needs. ChemLawn quickly put together a one-stop shopping program. Says Mulbarger: ''We started telling these companies, 'We can give you more than green grass and a weed-free lawn. We can improve your bottom line by making your appearance a marketing tool.' '' ChemLawn wanted to get clients to look at its services as an asset, not just as a cost item to be slashed when times turned tough. Company sales reps began photographing the grounds of potential customers. With a picture in hand, the reps were able to demonstrate what improvements could be made with the proper landscaping. Most of ChemLawn's commercial customers are banks, restaurants, and hotels -- businesses that need to pay special attention to how their grass and gardens grow. The company also retrained its sales force to pitch its new services not to maintenance personnel, as it had been doing, but rather to marketing vice presidents. These were the people who cared about issues such as occupancy rates and customer traffic patterns, and who needed to be convinced that ChemLawn's services could make a difference on the bottom line. ChemLawn seems to have gotten its message across: Commercial sales have been growing over 20% a year. Comparable repositioning won't be as easy on the residential side. Homeowners needn't worry about keeping up appearances the way businesses must. When money is tight and a little landscaping is necessary, they'll do it themselves, or pay minimum wage to have the teenager down the block do it. ChemLawn is trying to change the perception that it provides just a commodity lawn-care product. ''A year ago the typical residential service would involve going out to a home to fertilize and weed,'' says Mulbarger. ''Now we offer to move trees, plant flower beds, or put in shrubs for privacy.'' It's too soon to tell if ChemLawn's new approach will persuade recession-racked homeowners to start spending again.

-- ESTABLISH NEW LINKS TO CUSTOMERS. Companies that find a way to make life easier for their customers can leap past the competition. Baxter International, the $8.9-billion-a-year hospital products company, realized this several years ago when it began hearing about the problems of its largest customers. The hospitals told Baxter they were spending huge amounts of money simply storing and distributing supplies within the hospital. Baxter responded by developing ValueLink, a service that helps hospitals dramatically reduce inventory costs while improving the distribution of supplies. With ValueLink, hospitals can delegate to Baxter the time-consuming task of making sure essential items like needles, bandages, and syringes wind up in the right place in the proper amount. Since Baxter receives daily electronic information back at its own warehouses on just how much inventory each ValueLink customer is using, it has an accurate count on reorders. Furthermore, the electronic feedback tells Baxter exactly where in the hospital all those supplies go. Says Anthony Kesman, general manager of the ValueLink program: ''Hospitals are there to administer care, not to worry about managing inventory.'' Before signing on with Baxter last year, William McDonald, vice president of operations for Hermann Hospital in Houston, says he was spending about $17,000 a month for inventory warehouse space five miles from the hospital. That didn't include the cost of the hospital employees who worked there or liability insurance for the inventory. ValueLink, says McDonald, enabled him to eliminate those expenses as well as all his extra inventory. He figures the hospital has already saved nearly $800,000, and he estimates the savings will reach $8 million over the life of Hermann's five-year contract with ValueLink.

Baxter profits from ValueLink by charging a service fee equal to 3% to 6% of sales. However, the bigger payoff is that Baxter can often become a hospital's sole supplier. ''We must have been using hundreds of vendors before ValueLink,'' says McDonald. ''Now it's primarily Baxter.'' Robert Carretta, director of materials management at Saint Barnabas Hospital in Livingston, New Jersey, says that before signing up with ValueLink, he ordered about $500,000 worth of supplies a year from Baxter. Because he can now get so much of what he needs directly through ValueLink's delivery program, Baxter's share of Saint Barnabas's business has grown to $5 million a year. APPAREL MAKER VF is also using technology to eliminate some of the problems of the stores it supplies. In the course of studying the retail industry, VF found that many retailers are routinely out of stock on 30% of the items they want to sell, a situation that does little to fortify shoppers' loyalty to a store. Says CEO Lawrence Pugh: ''The challenge for us was to find a way of working more closely with retailers so they always had the right merchandise in the store when the customer wanted to buy it.'' VF figured the best way to do that was through its market response system (MRS) -- a computerized link between the company and the cash registers of its retailing partners. MRS enables VF to record detailed information about what is actually selling at individual stores. Discounters like Wal-Mart, which need to keep internal costs wafer-thin, have long demanded that manufacturers provide them with such information. But many of the larger department and specialty stores have been slower to catch on. The payoff for the retailers is that they run less risk of winding up with too much of a doggy item or not enough of a hot seller. The process helps VF tailor its manufacturing to reflect what the stores are selling. In addition, the point-of-sale information VF captures at the stores allows it to ship merchandise directly to a retailer instead of holding the goods at its own warehouses. That cuts delivery time from several weeks to as little as seven days. Says Josie Esquivel, a retailing analyst with Shearson Lehman Brothers: ''VF is ahead of most other apparel companies with its market response system.'' The company's efforts to sell more are working. In a miserable retailing environment, VF's earnings nearly doubled last year to $161 million on sales of $2.9 billion, a 13% increase. SELLING MORE in the 1990s is really about convincing customers that you can give them the best value, and perhaps more value, for the least money. It's a strategy that requires a genuine focus on the customer. John Franco, president of Learning International, a sales consulting firm in Stamford, Connecticut, was reminded of this recently close to home. For 15 years John Myers has tended the lawn at Franco's home. Since 1988 Myers, who owns a company called Happy Lawns, hasn't raised his prices a penny. But he has added two new services: fertilizing the shrubs and spraying environmentally safe pesticides on all the outdoor plants. ''When I asked why he hadn't increased his prices,'' says Franco, ''he said that if he did more for his customers without raising his rates he'd have a better chance of keeping them in the long run. All it would cost him, he said, was an extra seven hours a week.'' Not a bad way to run a business, big or small.