The cat ate my order!
David M. Fellman
I had a really weird dream the other night. I was sitting with a group of reprographics/wide-format printing salespeople, and they went around the room, introducing themselves. The first one said: “Hi, my name is Tom, and I’m an underachiever. It’s mostly because I don’t work very hard.” The second one said: “My name is Ellen, and I’m an underachiever too. In my case, it’s nothing more than a complete lack of product knowledge. I really have no clue about what I’m supposed to be selling.” The third one said: “My name is Tony, and I’m also an underachiever. I could work harder, and probably be more knowledgeable too, but my biggest problem is that I’m totally disorganized and I haven’t made even the slightest effort to change that.”
I woke up thinking that these were very strange salespeople. Can you imagine actually accepting the responsibility for being a poor performer? The underachievers I encounter always seem to blame someone—or something—else. I thought you might be interested in learning how I respond to some of their excuses.
Our Prices Are Not Competitive
Price is without question the easiest thing to blame, because it encompasses both the printing company and the buyer. With just one excuse, a salesperson can blame both the printing company for not having the lowest price, and the buyer for not appreciating the value the salesperson and the printing company bring to the table.
I tell salespeople that I adopted an attitude very early on in my selling career. Whenever I got the order, my thought process went, I could have charged more for it. I always figured I left at least some money on the table whenever I won an order.
The “flip side” to that attitude is that I couldn’t blame price when I lost an order. If I could get my price sometimes, I thought, why couldn’t I get it all the time? The most likely explanation was that I did a less-than-stellar job of understanding the buyer’s needs and wants, or else a less-than-satisfactory job of selling my value proposition. The only other possibility was that I was pursuing someone I shouldn’t have been spending time on in the first place—a price-monster! (That’s my term for people who make all their buying decisions based strictly on price.)
Either way, I tell salespeople, the failure was mine. And that’s OK, because you can’t sell to everyone. But you can learn from every failure and apply those lessons to the situations and decisions you’ll face in the future. If you really do bring value—and learn how to communicate that value effectively—you’ll win orders even when you don’t have the lowest price.