Jeff Bassindale, president of Green Bay, Wis.-based distributorship Innovative Document & Label Solutions, has been selling bar coded labels and bar code printers, scanners and software for nearly 20 years. During that time, he has learned how to market himself. The most important advice he offers: Make sure your customer knows everything there is to know about your products and services.
"The worse situation you want to find yourself in is when you ask your client, 'Do you know we sell bar code equipment?' and they answer, 'Oh, we just installed that last week.'" Unfortunately, most printing pros have experienced this scenario at least once. Smart salespeople avoid letting it happen a second time. To that end, Bassindale markets Innovative Document & Label Solutions as a one-stop shop for bar coding and label applications.
One of the distributorship's label clients, a cheese wholesaler, recently wanted to upgrade its warehouse from a manual order-picking operation to an accurate, efficient bar coded system. The client had been buying 1-color forms and labels from Bassindale and knew he had bar coding equipment as well. "When they had this bar coding project, we were able to help them through every step of the way," he says.
Bassindale sold the cheese wholesaler 15 Datamax bar code printers, 35 handheld scanners and label stock. Because each product's bin location needed to be bar coded, he suggested retroreflective stock by 3M that allows a bar code to be read from a distance. Forklift operators now can point their handheld scanners at a bin from several feet away and read the bar code without getting off their trucks. Employees who pick orders also use the handheld scanners.
Before Innovative Document & Label Solutions helped, workers for the cheese wholesaler pulled items from shelf bins and wrote order information onto multipart forms. When they moved a product to another bin, they made another manual entry. Some orders were picked incorrectly, and the client never knew with certainty how much inventory it had at a given time. With bar coding equipment in place, the client knows what orders are picked and when, plus current inventory levels. The increased productivity and accuracy is expected to save the company more than $100,000 annually.
It was a win-win situation for both parties. Prior to the project, Bassindale had been doing less than $5,000 a year in business with the company. Now, label sales alone account for between $50,000 and $75,000 annually. "I think your best and easiest sales are to existing customers," he says. "You always have to talk about the products you have. I would do that and they'd say, 'Yeah, we're thinking of getting into that.'" But good ideas often remain on the back burner.
Bassindale suggests patience until clients' document needs became priorities. "What drove the sale is the client moving the bar coding operation to the front burner," he says. "Once they had the money in the budget to spend on something like this, the sales cycle became much shorter. If you're not talking to existing customers about all of the products you have, you could miss the boat. If I was happy with selling forms and labels and missed the opportunity when they were ready to move, they would have gone to find someone else with a bar code product."
Bassindale worked with the cheese wholesaler for approximately four years before the big sale. During that time, when the client talked about paperwork flow and how it processed orders, he reminded the company about Innovative Document & Label Solutions' bar coding capabilities. "I firmly believe there are two types of salespeople--the farmer and the hunter," Bassindale says. "Farmers are good at taking care of customers, but they are not out there pursuing new opportunities and new business. Hunters are always looking for new opportunities."
-- Cheryl Dangel Cullen
