By Dave Fellman
One of my clients made an interesting observation recently. “I don’t think I’m very good at closing the sale,” he said, “but I seem to be doing OK at opening accounts.” As soon as I heard those words, I realized that my client had drawn an important distinction between selling print and selling a lot of other things. You hear a lot of talk about “closing techniques” on the sales training circuit, but we don’t need them in the printing industry—at least not in the traditional sense. What we really need are opening techniques, strategies and skills.
Defining The Sale
OK, let’s start this discussion by looking forward in the selling cycle to what all of us want to end up with — regular customers! How much “selling” really goes on at that stage of the relationship? If we define “selling” as the process of evaluating their needs on a particular project, making relevant suggestions, quoting a price and eventually writing the order, yeah, quite a bit of selling might be going on. I’m not sure that’s the best definition, though.
How about this definition…the most important “sale” that gets made in printing is the one that convinces the prospect to give you that first order, and even that is not a matter of “selling” that print job. What you’re really selling is that idea that you can meet their needs and their expectations — or to put it another way, that they should stop buying from the other guy and start buying from you!
Once you make that sale, you have “opened” an account, and if you provide your new customer with a satisfactory buying experience — a level of quality, service and “ease-of-doing-business-with” that reflects value in their minds — the chances are pretty good that you’ll have the opportunity to maintain and even grow the account.
Account Management
I have observed a trend toward “account managers” rather than salespeople in the printing industry. I think it’s worth considering, though, that there might not be an adequate number of accounts to manage and (hopefully) grow unless someone is actively involved in opening them. Granted, there always seem to be customers who find their way to you, rather than the other way around, but in my experience, the printing company that wants or needs to grow but waits for new customers to walk in the door is unlikely to see the kind of growth that its owner is hoping for.
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.