Key Activities: Establish Relationships
Identify & Address Friction Points
Connect to Relevant Products & Services
Understand Contact Roles
MRO Expert
MRO Expert
Position yourself as an MRO expert and show the value you can deliver by helping them manage the messy world of MRO.
- You build credibility quickly by demonstrating your MRO expertise and solving customers' challenges - both big and small. Often, it’s necessary to start small while you are still building the relationship. Once you’ve begun to build credibility by solving challenges, you can start to leverage that credibility to earn the right to consult at a higher level on how Grainger can help manage the complex and messy world of MRO.
Understand Contacts
Understand the role they play and the unique challenges that they face in purchasing MRO products. Overlay Sellers build credibility and demonstrate MRO expertise by first understanding the role your customer plays within their organization. This starts with knowing who buys and influences MRO and the specific challenges that they face when purchasing MRO. Contacts within the same organization will encounter different challenges depending on their role in the purchasing process. Doing your due diligence to ensure that you understand both organizational goals & challenges as well as your contact's individual challenges, will ensure that you suggest solutions that build credibility.
Connect to Relevant Products...
Connect them to relevant products, services and solutions that keep their businesses running, that save time and money and that increase efficiency and productivity. Relationships will be strengthened by your ability to positively impact your customer’s business. You act as a liaison between the suite of products and Customer Solutions that Grainger provides. By identifying and implementing ways to make your customers more efficient and increase their productivity, you will give them back the time and money that the messiness of MRO can take from them.
Identify Friction Points
Position ways to make it easier to do business with Grainger or to address friction they may be encountering from Grainger or another supplier. Ensuring that all contacts who use Grainger have seamless ways to engage with Grainger is an important part of maintaining your credibility with contacts. This is an ongoing process that will be discussed more later, but it’s very important that while establishing relationships, you identify any friction that customers face when purchasing from Grainger or other suppliers and begin to position ways to minimize that friction and make it easier to do business.
Final Establish Relationships
Talia Batchelder
Created on October 14, 2025
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Transcript
Key Activities: Establish Relationships
Identify & Address Friction Points
Connect to Relevant Products & Services
Understand Contact Roles
MRO Expert
MRO Expert
Position yourself as an MRO expert and show the value you can deliver by helping them manage the messy world of MRO.
Understand Contacts
Understand the role they play and the unique challenges that they face in purchasing MRO products. Overlay Sellers build credibility and demonstrate MRO expertise by first understanding the role your customer plays within their organization. This starts with knowing who buys and influences MRO and the specific challenges that they face when purchasing MRO. Contacts within the same organization will encounter different challenges depending on their role in the purchasing process. Doing your due diligence to ensure that you understand both organizational goals & challenges as well as your contact's individual challenges, will ensure that you suggest solutions that build credibility.
Connect to Relevant Products...
Connect them to relevant products, services and solutions that keep their businesses running, that save time and money and that increase efficiency and productivity. Relationships will be strengthened by your ability to positively impact your customer’s business. You act as a liaison between the suite of products and Customer Solutions that Grainger provides. By identifying and implementing ways to make your customers more efficient and increase their productivity, you will give them back the time and money that the messiness of MRO can take from them.
Identify Friction Points
Position ways to make it easier to do business with Grainger or to address friction they may be encountering from Grainger or another supplier. Ensuring that all contacts who use Grainger have seamless ways to engage with Grainger is an important part of maintaining your credibility with contacts. This is an ongoing process that will be discussed more later, but it’s very important that while establishing relationships, you identify any friction that customers face when purchasing from Grainger or other suppliers and begin to position ways to minimize that friction and make it easier to do business.