Advantages of Membership: Delco Sales

Celebrating 60 years in business, this California firm provides insights on data reporting, industry technology, social media and more.

By Jon Thomas, CPMR, President, N.H. Yates & Co; AIM/R Board of Directors

With two of its offices separated by 2,759 miles and its main office in Anaheim, Calif., Delco Sales covers a lot of ground (with the Pacific Ocean in between). Owned by Chris Nicosia and Larry Burchill, the firm has forged a reputation for customer service by focusing on people and relationships while always keeping an eye on the future.

Delco stocks its brands in a 50,000 sq. ft. facility in Anaheim, a 6,000 sq. ft. facility in Hawaii and a 6,000 sq. ft. facility in southern Nevada. The duo bought Delco (short for David E. Lasher Co.) in 2010, with Nicosia serving as CEO and Burchill as COO, when it had 24 employees; that number has expanded to 66.

Providing the products customers need for daily will-calls, large jobs or special-order materials in the plumbing/heating, water/fire, specifications and irrigation verticals, Delco represents manufacturers that support its bundling efforts and create value.

I recently caught up with Chris and Larry to glean some of their insights about the value of being involved with AIM/R and learn the keys to their success.

Jon Thomas: When and how did you get involved in AIM/R?

Chris Nicosia: We bought the company from Steve Clapp, who was active in AIM/R in the late 1990s. He became less involved, and when we bought the company, I came back and have attended most all the meetings since 2012.

JT: Have you brought any specific ideas back from AIM/R events and implemented them? 

CN: Every time I attend, the integrity, the level of professionalism within the organization, and the effort to make every agency be the rep of the future impresses me. Look at how our business is changing. I came back seven years ago, and I looked at Larry and said: “We need to hire a marketing manager. We need somebody controlling our social media. Our manufacturers are going to start asking for it.” 

We immediately hired a part-time person to really start platforming Delco in a way we had never done before. That’s one example of really participating with AIM/R. So many things have helped me view our business from 30,000 feet. I think AIM/R’s been extremely helpful as I steer where we need to go in the future and how we need to look at our agency being Rep 2.0.

JT: How is Delco Sales approaching the technological changes in the industry?

Larry Burchill: No matter how absorbed we get with technology and consolidation, the one thing I can tell you about our industry that still holds true today — and will continue to hold true into the future — is that it’s very relational. Our affiliation with AIM/R and further yet, having our younger generation go through CPMR is critical. 

The most important thing for our team is being in front of the customer face-to-face. Preparation, diversification, communication and collaboration — those are the things that have created our success. 

JT: Technology has also changed a lot over the last few years with COVID-19. What changes have resulted from it?

CN: Well, especially here in Hawaii, we completely shut down, and California was shut down. We started immediately conducting online virtual trainings, trying to create value for the customers. We’ve continued to do that. We have our schedule for the first six months of the year doing CEU classes, and we did one where we had 84 participants. So, we’ve learned a lot from it, we’re continuing to do it, and we promote them via social media.

JT: How have the functions you perform for manufacturers changed since you bought Delco Sales in 2010? 

CN: Managing expectations at all levels and planning, far more today than 13 years ago. All our manufacturers are much more sophisticated with data, but the data doesn’t always tell the full story. 

The reporting we do for many of our lines is time-consuming and it takes a number of people to complete these reports weekly and monthly. We always want to give them what they need, but we certainly do far more today than in years past. Time, at the end of the day, is our currency. Preparation is not a bad thing — it is the key to success. 

LB: What pops into my head goes back to what I was talking about earlier: face-to-face selling. We’re very grounded and very gritty in that space. So, what do you want: robots sitting behind a desk mining data, or do you want my guy in front of a customer selling product? Well, they want the best of both worlds. And the hardest part for us is this: Do you want news reporters, or do you want news makers? It’s a major tax on our people.

We have a CRM called Rep Fabric and ISQuote — both of which we learned about from AIM/R — and Microsoft Teams. Our manufacturers use their own systems. 

And the hardest thing is to take an outside sales guy when you have X amount of lines and say: “Here’s your line packages. We want diversity in those line packages, so we need you to focus on these key things for the hunt. And by the way, I need you to take Mondays and Fridays and stay home and report. OK? And oh, in your report, it looks like this one particular repair part is down 50 percent, but it’s $873 worth of total sales volume.”

So, I go back to news reporting vs. news making, and we always tell our people this: At the end of the day, we will get extended grace if we’re hitting the number. 

JT: I recall talking with you at an event a couple of years ago about your locker system; how’s that going?

CN: It’s one of the ways we’re looking to service the customer, especially in our markets where traffic is such an issue. We’ve got people who start very early in the morning. Sometimes in the water heater business, you need a part or you’ve got a gas valve that’s gone out. So we set up a locker system where customers can come to the location anytime of the day and pick up their order using a code. It has been successful and a good marketing asset.

JT: You have a full-time marketing person and are active on social media. What are you seeing in that realm?

CN: At the last AIM/R meeting, I attended an engineering panel and was shocked by two things. No. 1, out of the five people on the panel, none of them are on social media. You want to reach them; you send a personal email. The other thing I was amazed about was that they all still want paper literature. When we call on engineers, they want paper, and they don’t get their information from social media.

However, we do use social media to promote our virtual trainings, new products and events. We want to make sure that we’re hitting all the matrices for our manufacturers. 

LB: Look at our industry as a whole; there’s a generational gap between the generation coming up and the existing generation. So when you talk about social media influencers, I’ll see things on LinkedIn and think it sounds really good, but sometimes you wonder if influencers really know what they’re talking about. 

I think people who have been in the industry a long time don’t really care about influencers. They want to know and understand a product and the engineering behind it.

And the generational gap — even on the contracting side — is what we’re all trying to figure out. How do we transition the communication from the generation coming up and those of us who have been around for a while? That’s the big question. So, Chris and I, when we first partnered up, said, “OK, what can we do that we don’t see most other reps doing?”

We needed to make investments in the next generation, so we started hiring and matching them with older mentors and investing in their education. And I think that is what’s brought us tremendous success: we have one of the most diversified benches of any rep agency, I think, in the industry.

JT: What are you proudest of? 

CN: The culture we’ve created and the people we employ because without them, we’re nothing. I think we’ve created an environment and a culture of service. I tell all our people that’s really what we sell, a customer service experience. That’s what we do. We happen to sell some plumbing products, but at the end of the day, customers come back because of who we are, the service we provide.

It’s no different than the reason you go to your favorite restaurant over and over again because of the consistency, because of the experience. We sell a customer service experience. Larry and I are both working principals. We’re the first ones up in the morning making calls, and we lead by example. And I think we’ve created a culture where people love working for us. They love being part of a winning team, and that’s what I’m most proud of.

LB: All I can add is that our turnover is almost zero. Our people stay with us and love working for us.