Selling Print Requires More Than Order Taking

Printed communication is always part of a larger business process. If you print for retail stores, the print is part of their retail marketing business process. If you print enrollment packages for the healthcare industry, the print is part of their enrollment business process. If you print labels for a brewery, the print is a critical part of their supply chain.

Successful print sales people engage with their customers to understand the business process that surrounds the print because that gives the printer the opportunity to work more strategically with their customers. 

What if you have a print sales team that can only talk about print? This is a challenge faced by almost every printer we engage with. The customer’s expectations have outrun the current print sales team’s skill set. The customer wants solutions to their data challenges, their fulfillment challenges, the ability to track effectiveness of their printed communication, and their ability to accurately track waste and obsolescence. Basically the customer wants you to solve multiple challenges before and after the print.

Surprise, surprise: most of the customer’s challenges are best solved by the combination of strategic thinking and software. In a recent seven-figure recurring print program sale, I tracked the percentage of time the topic of conversation was about the printed materials and the amount of time dedicated to data management, reporting, etc. The split was 10% about print and 90% about the strategic approach to using technology to solve the other business process challenges. The 10% spent on the print was almost entirely about how the printer intended to optimize the recurring print runs of highly personalized materials (so even that was strategic in nature).

Why are customers so responsive to strategic thinking and additional business process improvements from printers? My theory is that we are in the middle of a serious delusion; companies continue to expect more and more results out of fewer and fewer people. Everywhere I engage with printer’s customers, the feeling of “overwhelm” is palpable. Individuals are being asked to accomplish impossible amounts of work so their response is to find creative ways to get that work done without adding headcount. What would you do if you were in a marketing organization that was expected to achieve results that should take 20 people and you currently have a staff of 10? You would get your vendors to do a lot more for you, even if it costs you a little more money.

This is a great opportunity, but it requires a print sales team with skills beyond print.

I think the most important skill for a sales person to be effective in this environment is natural curiosity. When you are genuinely curious, it makes it easy for you to probe around lots of different business processes with an authentic desire to listen and learn. Curious people want to learn. Curious people know how to listen. Curious people don’t interrupt. When you’re curious, your focus is on learning from others—not pontificating about what you know (a common bug in the sales profession).

The challenge here is that we interview sales people and judge them mostly on their ability to sell (which means talking). A strategic sales person is a listener and a great author of open-ended questions. When your priority is to learn about the customer’s business process, you cannot be the one talking. Think about your current sales team, then think about the customers they are engaging with. Ask yourself one serious question: How much does your sales team really know about the business processes of your customers? This is a great start to managing your sales team to be active and lifelong learners. This is not an age thing; this is a behavioral pattern that can be changed under the right conditions.