Print sales into the future – Print21 magazine article

In a high-demand market for print, superstar sales people can name their own price and work only on ‘getting the orders’. When supply outstrips demand, as with today’s printing industry, businesses should focus more on marketing, relationship-building and brand promise, says Andy McCourt. Even as W2P automates ordering online, we will always need sales people, but with new skill sets and a more sophisticated marketing approach to negotiations.

“The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want. You take me, for instance. I never have to wait in line to see a buyer. ‘Willy Loman is here!’ That’s all they have to know, and I go right through. I knocked ‘em cold in Providence, slaughtered ‘em in Boston.”

These words, spoken by Arthur Miller’s character Willy Loman in his 1949 play Death of a Salesman, give an insight into the mind of a career salesman. Be popular, look sharp, get around your territory, network and pursue the dream. You’ll knock ‘em cold in Melbourne, and you’ll slaughter ‘em in Brisbane.

But as we know, Loman is a tragic figure with a major fault – he believes his own sales pitch. Driven by nothing more than the pursuit of materialism and his own ego, he neglects being a good father to his two sons, does not appreciate the simple love of his adoring wife and fails to recognise that the world of commerce moves on from past conventions.

He eventually loses his salaried position and opts for a commission-only job with the company he has worked with for 34 years. Despite his hard efforts to ‘knock ‘em cold’ his productivity is insufficient, and he loses that job too. The next thing he loses is his mind and then his life, by his own hand. He figures out he’s worth more dead than alive, through insurance policies, and crashes his car in a final act of sacrifice that will deliver a payout to his family.

A modern print tragedy
It’s a tale very much in the vein of the Greek tragedies that Miller modelled it upon, although Loman is a middle-class working American rather than a high-born Oedipus or Antigone. Forgetting the Aristotlean connection, there is another message and that is that salesmen are not perennially relevant unless they adapt to the constantly changing business environment.

In the modern world of print sales, this is becoming more apparent, and yet so many printers think that a gung-ho sales force, combined with fine craft-based print production, will win the day. A better product, sold well…you’re on a winner for sure. Maybe when print media was more in demand than the supply could keep up with, this was true; but in our industry, the rules of commerce have moved on. It’s no longer about winning deals and contracts by sharp sales practices and ‘have I got a deal for you’ pitches. It’s about the relationship between the customer and the vendor.

I can already hear howls of derision from the CRM sceptics. “Customers are only interested in the lowest price,” they might say. “There is no loyalty anymore, therefore the relationship doesn’t matter … it’s price, price, price.”

I call this ‘Two-dollar shop mentality’. You can get an amazing array of products in the two-dollar bargain shops and they are successful in their own market niche – based on price, price, price. Because price is the promise, there is no effort to sell you anything, just help yourself to what you want and pay the person on the way out. No loyalty programs, no airline miles, no fancy merchandising, just stack the shelves high and sell low. Two dollar shops are fine – if you like that sort of thing.

Fire the loss-making customers
But in the printing industry, if you have the majority of customers who only buy like this, I have some advice for you. Let them go. Don’t try to sell to them. If you can’t make a fair profit from a transaction, don’t go breaking your neck so you can lose money. Find customers that better suit your business model and cost base. Alternatively, keep selling to them on price only and keep complaining – but not to me please.

Successful modern print sales depend on many factors, not the least of which are: a deep understanding of true costs, the customer, the market in general and, above all, human relationships and behaviour. In the online world, companies such as VistaPrint do all of these things very well indeed and they don’t have a single sales rep on the road. You think VistaPrint only sells on price? Think again.

I priced a real job, a simple A4 CMYK one-sided flyer, 1,000 copies. VistaPrint’s online price? $420.99 plus delivery and extra for logo upload and proof if I wanted them. My friendly trade offset printer ran this small job off at $180, and on 150gsm instead of Vista’s 120gsm. I am sure Vista still gets plenty of business at these prices and why? Because they are excellent marketers and they know their costs and margins to the nth degree. Many printers do not really know their true costs and take a stab at pricing to win deals.

W2P – your silent salesman
Which brings me to something every printer should have by now but many don’t: a well-constructed web-to-print strategy. By this I don’t mean many of the half-arsed attempts I see out there with clunky slow websites telling me what wonderful presses they run and how many awards they’ve clocked up since Uncle Bert founded the business in 1923.

I mean, a proper, user-friendly, accessible W2P site that serves as both a time-saver for existing customers and a marketing tool for those you are hoping to attract. It should be good enough so they tell their friends, who will then visit the site and say, “Wow! Mitch was right, this is what I have been looking for.”

W2P websites are not advertising, so don’t create them as you would a printed ad. They are portals into your world of wonderful service and print buying experiences, where ingénue ‘Alices’ should be free to wander in awe into your Wonderland of graphic communications. They are windows into a new world of commercial opportunities, but many printers either stay on one side of the glass, or pull the blinds down completely.

Web-to-print is another feature article altogether but suffice to say, this silent salesman is worthy of investment and development, along with its close allies, search engine optimisation (SEO), affiliate marketing and social media.

A shining example must be the launch of We Print It, a federation of seven print sites around the country offering digital and offset production at all levels. They launched with a very slick printed marketing piece backed by W2P and even an iPhone app. That’s the way to do it! iPhone apps are selling just about everything else today, so why not print? How cool would it be to respond to a customer query “When will my job be ready?” with the sales rep showing it in the bindery, via webcam, on his iPhone or iPad?

Introducing your best salesman
The best salesman for your print company works for free – and I don’t mean the poor unfortunate proprietor! While he or she often works long hours for diminishing returns, the best salesmen and women of all are – your customers.

If you have a great product or service, customers sell for you. They sell to themselves and to other departments within their organisation and they sell to others through their networks and affiliations. They are proud to refer your company to friends and colleagues but the worse thing that can happen is they pass on your contact details, the new prospective customer calls or emails and then – nothing. No follow-up, no hunger for the new business, no courtesy and no progress. This is where relationship management comes into its own.

The early stages of any relationship are the most critical. Are you serious or only interested in a one-night stand? With print sales, the first job for a newly referred customer should receive intensive coddling with regular calls, questions and maybe a press check site visit. Meet the family, have a coffee, get to know the customer.

A predominantly marketing-based approach to gaining and retaining customers is far better than a sales-only approach. With this in mind, print sales people need to be better informed on all aspects of the company’s offerings, have a firm knowledge of real costs and the ‘walk-away’ prices and be prepared to be with the customer every step of the way – not just when the order is taken. Come to think of it, is today’s ideal print sales representative really a print manager? I think they are in parallel universes. Print management companies succeed not just because they are better marketers, but also because they exhibit all of the attributes desirable in a great sales person. Constant contact, excellent communication and people skills, caring for detail, nothing too much trouble and a result every time.

Face up to it
A sales presentation I gave some years ago spoke of three ‘Faces’ of selling:
•    Face-to-Face: the most effective way but time and resource intensive.
•    Face-to-Base: encourage customers to deal with the office, telephone, email and fax touch-points backed by occasional face-to-face.
•    Face-to-Space: cyberspace that is. The web, social media etc. Create a compelling reason for doing business over the web with e-commerce.

I suppose you could add Face-to-Facebook too! A blend of all methods works best for most print businesses but to achieve overall success requires marketing.

The bridge between your business and your customer base needs to be established and maintained with advertising, regular contact, conversations, offers, events and brand-building that takes you out of the dog-eat-dog world of price-only selling where it is a race to see who can go broke first through selling at a loss.

Willy’s son, Happy Loman, towards the end of Death of a Salesman says: “I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have - to come out number-one man.”

There’s nothing wrong with such a dream for a sales person. Thing is, to realise it, there is one heck of a lot of reality to get through these days.