By Dave Fellman
(NOTE: Most of what I’ve written for the APDSP Newsletter has been strategic, and intended for owners and managers. This one, I think, is something you want your salespeople to read. I hope you’ll agree.)
I spent some Zoom-time with a group of high-school friends/teammates last night. These guys all still live around our home town, so they see each other frequently, even with COVID-19 going on. The last time I saw any of them was 5-6 years ago. In my honor, I guess, the theme for the evening seemed to be trashing the “Fellman Legacy.”
“You used to have a reputation,” my friend Charlie said. “Now all you got is a legacy, but people still talk about who you used to be.”
Afterward, I got to thinking about how “legacy” and “reputation” apply to printing salespeople. Have you ever thought about how your reputation precedes you and follows you and affects whether people will want to work with you—as customers or co-workers or employers? And while you may not be thinking so far into the future right now, have you ever thought about how you are building your legacy? If there really is a “Fellman Legacy”—at least in terms of my business—I would like it to be this: “He worked hard for his customers, and for his company. He was a good teammate.”
I think the best printing salespeople are members of many teams, starting with the team at their own workplace, and extending to making themselves part of their customers’ teams. Make no mistake, though, you can’t be an effective member of a customer’s team unless your foremost commitment is to your company team. And that’s an area where, sadly, many printing salespeople fall short. You probably know the saying that there’s no “I” in “team.” In my experience, most salespeople operate with too much “I” and not enough “we.”
I have spoken and written about stressing the “we” as part of your value proposition. What I’m talking about today is a little different, because it’s not about selling the team, it’s about building and/or strengthening the team. Maybe the best way to explain this is with another sports analogy. If you play a team sport, your teammates need you to play your position to the best of your ability, in every minute of every game. Beyond that, they have every right to expect you to continually work at improving your skills. When those things don’t happen, teams lose more often than they win. And everyone generally knows who’s helping the team, or hurting it.
As a printing salesperson, it is sometimes your job is to be the advocate of the customer to the company. At other times, it’s the other way around. I’m sure you’ve been in the situation where you’ve had to fight to get a customer’s order delivered on time. That’s advocating for the customer. I’m also pretty sure you’ve been in the situation where you had to explain to a customer why their order was going to be late. That, of course, is advocating for the company. This, more than anyplace else, is where reputations get made in printing sales, and the key issue is honesty.
Have you ever lied to your company by overstating the customer’s needs? In my experience, it’s pretty common for a salesperson to fudge a delivery date by a couple of days, justifying that as “looking out for my customer.” But what if the company had to turn down another opportunity because of this misrepresentation? What if another salesperson lost out on a commission because of it?
Have you ever lied to a customer about why a delivery was late, or not told them it was going to be late until it was too late to do anything about it? There’s an old saying in politics that it’s not the crime that kills you, it’s the cover-up. I think the reputation you want is for absolute honesty—with customers and with your company. Ultimately, that’s what makes you the kind of salesperson people want to work with, and again, that’s as customers, co-workers and employers.
So how about your reputation? What would your legacy be? If you’re not happy with the reality of the answers to those questions, I hope you’ll start working at changing your reputation—and right now would be a good time!
Dave Fellman is the president of David Fellman & Associates, Cary, NC, a sales and marketing consulting firm serving numerous segments of the graphic arts industry. Contact Dave by phone at 919-363-4068 or by e-mail at dmf@davefellman.com. Visit his website at www.davefellman.com.