Print Solutions Magazine

It matters not that no two customers and no two circumstances are the same, but a future anthropologist reading the business literature of our era would reasonably conclude that every sales call has one of the two purposes: Get an order, or provide service on an already-placed order.

We tend to focus on steps to maximize the sale (“upsell”) to become a more effective closer, and to do so as efficiently as possible. Perhaps all of this is more relevant in the sale of real estate, a boat or a private airplane. It becomes less appropriate if your products and services are purchased frequently, such as those sold by most Print Solutions readers.

Yes, it’s helpful to be a good “closer,” use time wisely, and upsell effectively. But if successful print sales ever were a sprint, it’s evolving into a long-distance race where one error can result in being trampled by the competition. This isn’t a message most of you want to hear. No distributor, no matter how successful, finds the selling process easier. Few feel secure. Seasonality can be a cash flow roller-coaster ride. Robust sales today may be followed by famine for several weeks.

We’d all like a short-term fix. Time is the dearest commodity to most distributors. Success is increasingly measured in terms of short-term results. That, ironically, discourages salespeople from investing the time, planning and information-gathering needed to establish and develop a lucrative account portfolio.

Selling isn’t tactical! One well-known sales training guru who sells millions of dollars in books, tapes and seminars, says the key to successful selling is detection of chin-rubbing and pupil dilation in buyers, which he says are important buying signals. Ridiculous!

Selling isn’t a game. Long-term success requires an understanding of the customer’s business. It’s little more than using intelligence, empathy and homework to match customer needs with a supplier’s capabilities in a mutually profitable relationship. Selling is a process, never concluded, that establishes mutual importance between the buyer and seller.

This brings me to another concept: Sales has a quality as well as a quantity. Other than occasional references to profitability, today’s sales textbooks focus on “getting the order,” and the more the better and the larger the better. If selling ever was exclusively a qualitative concept, that notion is quickly disappearing.

Most nationally known sales training gurus dispense advice that is only half-right. They counsel that on every sales call the rep should leave with more information than he/she had before the visit. I agree, but they ignore the other half of the equation. On every sales call, you should bring at least one piece of credible, relevant information that’s immediately actionable by the customer or prospect. The objective of most sales calls should be to create conditions that make the customer want to do business with you. Done effectively and consistently, the result will be a relationship based on trust.

Am I too idealistic? Have I failed to recognize that some buyers make decisions solely on price? I acknowledge that, but I don’t believe it’s an inevitable condition. Providing one piece of usable information on every sales call will, in many cases, create more perceived buyer value than mere price. Enhancing the buyer’s perception of value in your products and services takes time, planning and patience. Here are two pieces of research as evidence, both generated many years ago in the graphic arts industry:

• The average new account places its first order with a new supplier after 5.2 sales calls. The print sales rep gives up prospecting after 4.8 calls because he/she feels there’s nothing additional to say.

• The second most common reason buyers cite for discontinuing relationships with print companies: “The salesperson was here just to get an order, and never took the time to really learn my business and my needs.”