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Can You Please Tell Me What You Sell? SALES CLINIC Warning: Don't take prospects through a laundry list of jargon and buzz words. By Joe Rickard • Printing supply chain solutions • Variable data printing • Cross-media marketing Trying to give a prospect an under- standing of what is being sold by using industry jargon is a path to failure. If the prospect does not know what a vendor actually sells, there is no next step in the sales process. A good exercise is for sales and production people to spend some time together listing on a flip chart exact- ly the size and formats that are available within the shop for each product or offer- ing based on press size and capability. Questions that Should Be Answered Here are some questions that salespeo- ple should be able to answer before devel- oping tailored positioning statements for their customers. • In general, what are the exact names of the offerings and solutions? Do you sell brochures, booklets, cata- logs, postcards, packaging, and tickets? Using terms that a customer would use in their business is a way to gain interest. • What specific formats do we offer? T he very frst thing that a printing salesperson must do before conducting a face-to-face sales call is to be able to clearly ar- ticulate what they are selling. Most of us have experienced situations where after talking to a salesperson, we were not really sure what the salesperson was actually offering. Cus- tomers fnd this frustrating and annoying. Recently, we heard from a printing salesperson who called us to practice their sales call with a customer. It was a polite, very professional sales call except for one major item: When asked what types of products and services they offered, the salesperson took us through a laundry list of printing jargon and buzz words. If this was an actual sales call, the new customer would have left the conversation still not knowing exactly what the salesperson was selling. The First Step A positioning statement, or value prop- osition, is a brief dialog that highlights who you are, what you sell, and the unique value you bring. It should always conclude with a good closing statement or question to gain a reaction establishing enough curiosity and interest to move the customer forward in the sales process. Knowing and communicating what you sell is the very first thing any salesperson needs to know and do before developing their positioning statement. This is espe- cially true for the printing industry since potential print programs and projects are often complex and not easily understood by many customers. Our Survey In the last few months, we have been doing quite a bit of research by question- ing printing salespeople who we know and work with. Their experience levels range from relatively new to the printing industry to people who have been suc- cessful for more than 30 years. We explained that we were doing an informal survey on sales behavior. We asked them what their positioning state- ment was. A few gave us good ones; many gave poor ones. We rated the positioning statement based on three criteria. One, did we understand what they were selling? Two, was the opening statement compelling and demonstrate value for a typical cus- tomer? Three, did it arouse our interest enough for us to want to continue the sales call and ask the question "tell me more?" What We Found In every case, the poor positioning statement lacked clarity on exactly what was being sold. If it wasn't crystal clear to us what a printing salesperson was selling, the chances of most customers under- standing are very doubtful. Common Terms Printing Sales People Use on Sales Calls It was an eye opener for us how many salespeople could not define in a sentence or two what they were actually selling. There were a great deal of vague gener- alities. Common words and phrases used by printing salespeople in our sample included: • Direct mail solutions • Print programs • Web-to-print solutions • Commercial printing products • Marketing services • High-quality printing • Fast-turnaround digital printing © iStockphoto/Thinkstock M a y 2 0 1 4 / Q U I C K P R I N T I N G 27 w w w. M y P R I N T R e s o u r c e . c o m (continued on page 28) QP_25-28_0514 MoneyT-SalesC.indd 27 4/15/14 5:06 PM