The article originally appeared on LinkedIn, dated November 30, 3021.
I work with a lot of sales professionals, and because of the demographics in the printing industry, most are between the ages of 55 and 65 years old. This is the same age range as most owners I also work with.
The similarities between the two groups often end at age. Most owners are continuous learners. They regularly attend conferences and participate in national and local peer groups. Owners do this for the opportunities that interacting with other business leaders affords them. They also know it’s an excellent way to keep their finger on the pulse of their industry, the markets they serve, and their local business community.
More often than not, this is the opposite of what sales professionals in the printing industry do. Many are not focused on learning, don’t invest their own money in developing skills, and under-utilize the opportunities provided to them by their companies and the industry at large. If I had to name them, it might be ‘Coasters.’ In fact, I’ve had many tell me, “I’m just trying to get to retirement,” and one actually said he wanted to “coast into retirement.”
What coasting looks like to me as a sales trainer, coach, and fractional sales manager boils down to these critical behaviors
Refusal to acknowledge their steady decline in sales has anything to do with how they sell. (It’s the economy, younger buyers who don’t understand print, it’s the fact that no one wants to meet with salespeople today, it’s the company’s pricing, etc.)
Changing what they do daily will take more work than they are willing to do.
They allow themselves to be distracted by daily tasks by design or accident. They are convinced they are too busy monitoring jobs through the shop to ensure they are produced correctly, submitting or doing estimates, writing up jobs, making deliveries, and wandering around on LinkedIn or the internet – to focus on selling more.
The problem with this belief system is that an owner of that business is using his or her hard-earned cash to pay someone who wants to “coast into retirement.”
I have spent years analyzing this problem and think it has two leading causes.
Reps in the printing industry are typically not held accountable for performance. Keypoint Intelligence did a study when I worked there that found that 32% of the printers didn’t hold reps accountable at all. The others responded that they did, but their answer was no more than the ringing of hands and begging their reps to “sell more.” Very few noted that there was a consequence for continued underperformance. The steady decline has been allowed to stand unabated by owners with many other irons in the fire. I still run into companies that don’t set goals for their sales reps, so there isn’t anything to hold them accountable to each year. The expectation is to “sell what you can,” and that is precisely what the owner gets.
Companies don’t have a culture of continuous learning. I have reps who are afraid to write a prospecting email. They haven’t been in school for 30 years, and anything that resembles homework or learning is scary. Others don’t know how to use the software tools on their computers, haven’t invested their time to learn it, and haven’t used any internet content to improve their performance or streamline their work processes. If reps would research B2B buying changes, they would know how their messaging has to change to the attention of prospects. I run across reps who call the same prospect every 90 days or, worse yet, drop in to see those prospects and say something like, “We’d love an opportunity to work with you; please let us know if there is anything I can quote for you.” They haven’t investigated the prospect’s website, used a Google Alert to know that the prospect company has a new Director of Marketing, haven’t tried to connect with stakeholders on LinkedIn, or spent any time figuring out something different to say that might get that prospect’s attention. It’s the time equivalent of throwing good money after bad.
The selling skills of the existing sales reps and managers must improve to make the industry more attractive to younger talent.
If you think you may be in a similar situation, here are some steps to take:
Set goals for your sales rep or reps for 2024. The goals should represent an increase over 2023. Your rep or reps are supposed to sell. Simply maintaining existing accounts is only half of their job. Or, as one of my customers likes to say, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”
Establish learning goals or developmental activities that must be achieved to make the total commission rate. If those goals aren’t met, the rep loses commission. There is no accountability without consequences.
Learning or Developmental Goals
One of the reasons sales reps struggle to apply new training is it’s been a long time since they had “homework.” Creating an outline of how they want a sales appointment to go, capturing their ideas for prospect messaging, documenting the questions they want to ask, and sending summaries to clients all feel like homework, and they are out of practice. If reps are constantly working on developmental goals, they will be used to reading, documenting, planning, and executing.
Developmental goals should include a prioritized list of new and updated sales skills. Please work with your reps to identify areas for improvement and have them create a training plan that can include utilizing industry association resources like archived webinars, taking online courses, reading sales books, and learning about the various markets they support. Ensure that their plan includes a way for you to validate that they have achieved their developmental goal and are integrating the knowledge or skill gained into their daily work processes. Validation can include things like making a presentation to you, creating presentations to give to prospects, presenting an overview of a vertical market to your customer-facing team, and assessing their skill improvement during an in-person, virtual, or phone appointment with a customer. Reps should work on one needed improvement at a time and move on to the next developmental goal once completed. There should always be an active learning goal with a target completion date.
The rep creates the plan, and the sales manager or owner oversees their process and coaches them through the execution of their plan. The goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and have a timeline. If the rep’s plan includes a resource the owner has to pay for, it may be worth the investment, but the rep must be accountable for using the resource and completing their plan. The owner should only pay if the rep uses the valuable resource. The rep still has the learning goal but will have to either pay for the resource themselves or find something free to help them accomplish it.
Selling is changing fast. Gartner is projecting that 80% of all interactions between buyers and sellers will be digital by 2025. Many millennials already wish they could buy everything digitally. Is this because they don’t really want to talk to salespeople? No! It’s because they don’t want to talk to sales reps who are unprepared, peddle products, can’t help them move their business forward, and don’t know how to cost-justify what they are recommending. Today’s buyers want more, and if reps can’t give it to them, they prefer to buy it online.
Whatever the current state of your sales rep or team, now is the time to put a system into place that sets goals, holds reps accountable for both sales performance and continuous learning, and creates an environment that other talented people would want to join. If not, you might be coasting into retirement when you should be building your company’s value, so you hit retirement full speed with the money to enjoy it!
This article originally appeared on LinkedIn dated
Every couple of weeks or so, a printing company owner calls me to ask for help with sales. The primary issue is that reps are selling on price. The owner wants me to turn them into trusted advisors who can sell value.
I always get more of these calls during an economic downturn. After 911, during the 2008 recession, and in 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, my phone was literally ringing off the hook. I know how to fix the problem, but it takes hard work for the reps and their owner. Owners always start out fully committed; they want to put in the hard work, and they want their reps to buy into a new approach and become better sellers. Owners are paying me and want to get their money’s worth.
The reps rarely start out in the same place. They have seen their sales erode and have chalked it up to:
Customers who only care about price.
Increased competition from other printers who sell on price. (I rarely hear about competitors that are beating them with higher pricing).
Declining print budgets.
A rep rarely acknowledges responsibility for the lack of success. Reps tend to believe their plight is caused by external forces and not their inability to evolve their selling approach in the face of a radically different world.
There is no magic potion that turns a price-based seller into a value-based seller. Both reps and owners are looking for a quick fix and there just isn’t one.
Change is hard. I get it. I have been doing this for a long time. But what I don’t get and will never get is how easily reps and owners throw in the towel. It happened during those times in our history I mentioned earlier, and it’s happening again today. Owners are making excuses for why reps don’t have time to do the things they have learned. Reps see their owner’s waffling as an invitation to return to their traditional ways of selling. Prospecting stops. Being proactive comes to an end and everyone goes back to reacting to customer requests. A lot of hard work by everyone goes out the window.
But here’s the thing, there are print jobs to be won, omnichannel solutions to sell, oodles of display graphics, and signage opportunities, but if your team is selling on price, they are leaving value on the table. And you’ll be leaving it on the table tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.
Selling value means reps have to do research. They need to understand the challenges their customers face and the opportunities available to them. They need to understand business – how their customers make money, where they can improve employee productivity and how they increase profitability. Reps have to engage the people who control the objective, not just the ones who buy the print. They have to ask great questions and have meaningful conversations and they need to understand how to create value for the customer and demonstrate an improved ROI.
Reps who can sell value, make themselves indispensable because of their perspective, ideas and insight, and not because they know how to produce a print job inexpensively. They invest time in educating themselves and use a sound process that helps them identify opportunities, qualify them and then create value that makes them and their companies worth a higher price.
This cycle of starting to evolve and then falling back has hurt many printing companies and it hurts the industry. It’s one of the reasons the printing industry isn’t attractive to great sales talent. Great salespeople don’t want to sell on price, they want to sell something valuable. Selling value is how great sales professionals grow their sales and their incomes.
There’s a great (and short) book by Seth Godin called The Dip. I read it years ago and the main point is that mastery of anything is hard. Anyone trying to master something like a new sales process starts out full of excitement and adrenaline, but that starts to wane after that initial phase. You really have to stick with it through the long slog from initial excitement to mastery. But if you push through, you create a DIP that is bigger and wider and harder to get through for the competitors who follow.
Learning to sell value is a skill to be mastered. You may be in the valley of the DIP and close to the other side: mastery. Now is not the time to throw in the towel.
A few months ago, I asked for questions on LinkedIn to fuel an article. I’m a little late for the Summer Slump question, but slumps can happen at different times in the year so hopefully this answer will help next time you feel yourself heading into a slump.
1) How are small businesses using AI in their sales efforts?
Here is a short list of things I have seen with my coaching clients:
Identifying search terms – Reps can use AI engines to identify common SEO search terms for services like signage, direct mail, and omnichannel campaigns. Common search terms can be used in email subject lines, copy, and LinkedIn posts to create longer-form content like blog posts.
Prospect emails and a cadence of messaging, including voice mail scripts, emails, and LinkedIn messages about a specific topic. Reps can ask the AI engine to create multiple emails for a specific topic like improving response rates, increasing point of sale purchasing in a retail store, or B2B omnichannel lead generation.
Personalizing content sharing emails – reps are using AI engines to take a standard piece of content like their company’s blog post and personalize an email message to specific customers sharing the content.
LinkedIn Posts and personalized messages – This is the best thing since sliced bread for reps who struggled with a blank screen. They use it to create topics and posts, from direct mail and hot Pantone colors to signage and wayfinding. Describing the persona, you know what to target, and asking for an educational post helps to keep it from being too pitchy.
Some reps need help to write a grammatically correct response to a customer email. Now they can prompt an AI engine to write a professional email. It’s especially helpful when a customer is angry, and the rep needs to respond in a way that will calm the situation. Reps add the customer’s email to the prompt, and the AI engine writes a response that they can tweak easily.
Proposal Cover Letters – Reps who have a problem writing coherent emails will struggle with things like proposal cover letters, RFP question responses, and any other need to write something grammatically correct and coherent. AI is a big help with all of these activities.
AI integrations with CRM systems can do more, like lead scoring and building prospect lists. With third-party tools, sales reps can also use AI to prepare, update, and manage prospect databases saving time and streamlining the execution of direct marketing campaigns.
In today’s digital age, the seamless integration of artificial intelligence (AI) has paved the way for innovative approaches to content creation. AI engines with advanced voice analysis capabilities can revolutionize a company’s online presence. By dissecting the distinct voice embedded within a company’s website, these cutting-edge systems can comprehend the tone, style, and messaging and replicate it effortlessly in the content they generate. This transformative process ensures a consistent and authentic brand voice across various communication channels, fostering a stronger connection with audiences and enhancing the overall user experience.
We are at the tip of the iceberg on how AI will change sales. The biggest advice I can give owners, sales managers, and reps is to work with it. The more things you try, the better you get at the prompts and the less time it takes to generate what you need.
2) How are reps adjusting to the fact that more B2B buyers prefer to buy with limited involvement with sales reps?
I could write a book on this one. B2B Buyers rely on reps they consider trusted advisors. They take their calls, share their problems, and ask for opinions and advice. B2B buyers don’t want to talk to reps who can’t add value. Selling is not about pitching products. It is about helping customers solve problems. To solve a problem, a rep must understand the customer’s industry, objectives, challenges, how they use their products, how they could use their products, and the results they can generate. Professional sellers prepare, invest in themselves, and always work on improving their skills. They ask great questions, which leads to great conversations and sales opportunities. Selling is evolving quickly, and the best reps are also evolving. AI Chatbots will take over for the reps who get specs, send pricing, and keep their fingers crossed.
That said, it is much more difficult to get the attention of key B2B stakeholders. It takes a dedicated effort through many different channels, including traditional means of phone and email, as well as physical and virtual networking and sharing thought leadership via blogs and LinkedIn posts.
3) Are sales teams using omnichannel marketing to support their sales efforts in attracting prospects and upselling existing clients?
Good lead generation requires frequency and consistency. Sales reps often need to improve at both. If reps are responsible for prospecting and account management, they almost always tilt toward account management. If reps are good, existing account revenue will grow. However, the dual role often leads to fewer new customer opportunities. If reps are bad, companies lose customers and can’t find new ones to add.
Lead generation is critical today. It makes great reps more productive and covers up the sins of bad reps. Lead generation has to be omnichannel because customers and prospects interact in multiple channels and because omnichannel delivers better results than single-channel messaging. It’s better when omnichannel marketing is personalized and automates the follow-up messages based on the actions the prospect or customer has already taken. Lead generation is ideal when it includes a sales interaction when the customer’s actions show that their interest is building.
4) How can sales reps avoid the customer summer slump and keep the sales cycle moving?
This is a multi-part answer:
First, fill the pipeline with more opportunities. If reps only have a few things to work on and the decision makers for those opportunities are out or preoccupied with other business issues, decisions slip. Reps who know the summer or holiday months will be slow should fill their pipelines with more opportunities earlier in the year. A healthy pipeline has upside so if a decision slips, there is another one to take its place and reps can hit their monthly sales goals even in slower months.
Second, reps shouldn’t slow down because their customers are out. Reps should see the summertime as a way to get ahead of competitive reps who take their foot off the gas. Too many reps feel the slowdown and slowdown themselves.
Thirdly, figure out the types of businesses that are busy when your existing clients are slow. If you sell event signage, there will be many events in the summer. If your business slows during the holiday, target markets that are busy during the holiday season like retail, restaurants, and entertainment venues. Start talking to customers in the winter about what they’ll need in the summer and vice versa. If reps wait until their pipeline is light, they will likely be too late to influence decisions in their favor.
Lastly, customers buy because there is a reason to buy. Understand what your customers will need following a slow period and create a compelling reason for them to get started during your slow months.
The sales profession keeps evolving with the addition of new sales models, specialized sales positions, proactive CRM systems, powerful tools like AI, and changing B2B buying practices. Great reps keep learning and because they do, they overcome challenges and capitalize on the opportunities the market presents.
Use the contact form below to ask a question or to learn more about business development solutions from the Evolve Sales Group.
Liz was trying hard to make her sales numbers, but no matter what she tried, she wasn’t hitting her goals. She’s a “people person,” and her boss, the company owner, was sure she would succeed as a rep when he hired her more than a year ago.
She spent the first three months learning the ins and outs of the print and signage business. Her colleagues helped her understand what their equipment did and the information she would need to capture from the customer to help them produce a job correctly. She went with the owner to inspect sites and learned how to measure space and what she needed to be careful of when installing a graphics project or sign. She spent time with the mailing team and learned about direct mail and personalization. She familiarized herself with the most common papers and media and had a feel for the costs and how they could impact the quality of the product.
Her owner took her to meet a few customers in the early days, and it all seemed so easy. The sales just seemed to happen. She didn’t think she knew everything her owner did but felt she could talk to people about their projects and make a sale. She was confident she could reach her sales and income goals.
Unfortunately, things hadn’t turned out that way. She found it hard to get meetings, lost opportunities because of price, and couldn’t land any new customers. She was doing everything she read online; cold calling, follow-up emails, and sending samples…but nothing seemed to work.
Today, her boss told her he could not keep her if her sales didn’t pick up in the next 90 days. Liz was getting married in 6 months and was hoping to buy a house with her fiancé soon. She had hoped her commissions would help with all that, and now she was 90 days away from losing her job if something didn’t change. Her boss, who had been so helpful in the beginning, was knee-deep in the implementation of a new MIS system and didn’t have time to work with her.
She knew she needed to look for a new position.
That means ongoing sales training and coaching. Even owners with a sales background are often too busy running their companies to provide the necessary training and coaching to help their reps succeed. Even reps with sales experience from other industries need help adapting to the nuances of selling visual communications. If reps don’t develop the skills to be successful, they fail. When sales reps fail, owners waste money, and companies don’t grow.
Here are some statistics to keep in mind when planning to hire your next rep:
Only 19% of printing companies have a defined and documented sales process. Source: Marketing & Sales Best Practices Study – Karen Kimerer & Evolve Sales Group, Inc.
Businesses with a standardized sales process see up to a 28% increase in revenue compared to those without. Source: Harvard Business Review.
90% of the companies that use a formal, guided sales process were ranked as the highest-performing companies in their class. Source: Sales Management Association
68% of all salespeople do not follow a sales process at all. Source: Objective Management Group
62% of salespeople who are not on track to meet quota say they are not taught to communicate value. Source: Value Selling Associates
Continuous training results in 50% higher net sales per sales rep. Source: The Brevet Group
Successful sales coaching programs increase average deal size, sales activity, win rates, and new leads by 25%-40%. Source: Rain Group
66% of companies surveyed who have implemented structured sales coaching practices saw increased employee engagement and retention. Source: Value Selling Associates and Training Industry, Inc.
33% of printing companies do not offer any form of sales training. Another 29% offer sales skills training quarterly or only twice per year. Source: Marketing & Sales Best Practices Study – Karen Kimerer & Evolve Sales Group, Inc.
Struggling sales reps are five times more likely to report they weren’t fully onboarded & productive one year after starting their job. Source: Spekit
40% of sales professionals lack the training & coaching needed to conduct virtual sales successfully. Source: Salesforce
Top-performing reps only “Pitch” 7% of the time. Source: Sales Insights Labs
92% of B2B Buyers are willing to engage with a rep known as a thought leader. Source: Fit Small Business
Only 26% of sales onboarding is tweaked to account for a new hire’s pre-existing strengths & weaknesses. Source: Allegro
7% of sales reps will leave their job if the training or onboarding experience is poor. Source: Spekit
The average time for a sales rep to become productive across all industries is 3.2 months. Source: Hubspot
43.8% of printing firms surveyed reported that new reps were productive within 3 to 6 months. 33.5% of companies reported that reps were productive in six to twelve months or more. Source: Best Practices of High-Performance Print Sales Organizations, Keypoint Intelligence
93% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their careers. Source: Workforce Learning Report – LinkedIn.
66% of companies don’t believe their managers have the skills to manage and coach sellers. Source: Entrepreneur
If Liz’s story sounds familiar and you are tired of hiring and firing reps, isn’t it time to rewrite it? Outsourcing to experienced trainers and coaches who know the industry well can help your business outshine its competition. Find an expert to tailor a program to fit the needs of your business and reps and write a new ending.
Use the contact form below to get to inquire about Evolve Sales Group training and coaching solutions.
In December, I used a LinkedIn post to solicit questions from owners, sales managers, and sales reps. If you have sales or sales management questions you’d like to ask, send them my way via LinkedIn or via email: [email protected].
Here are the answers to the first two:
Q1: What are some areas of training and development for sales professionals in every stage of their careers?
According to data from the Brevet Group, ongoing training results in 50% higher net sales per sales rep. Printing companies tend to rely upon their vendor partners for much of their sales training resulting in more product training than skills training. However, product training doesn’t always move the performance needle. While it helps, it often leads sales reps to pitch new services in the wrong places and rely too heavily on product specs instead of using an insight-driven sales process to create demand. A combination of selling skills account development strategies, and product training delivers the best results.
All sales professionals, no matter the stage of their careers, benefit from refreshing their skills and learning new strategies to help penetrate accounts and develop new opportunities.
Selling has shifted, and the best sales reps are seen as trusted advisors by their customers, not just printing experts. Trusted advisor status grows from business acumen, marketing knowledge, and high-level selling skills. The more reps understand the markets they sell into, the more valuable they are to their clients. Training on business acumen, focus market trends, critical business challenges, marketing strategies and tactics, and position-oriented responsibilities will help reps have more relevant conversations with key stakeholders.
Virtual selling has become the norm even in the print industry, so assessing the virtual selling skills of reps, especially more tenured reps, will help you define specific training priorities. Reps may need training on using virtual tools like Zoom and Teams, using presentation applications like Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote, and delivering compelling presentations virtually.
For some reps, training in business writing may be necessary. Writing a professional email, prospecting letter, or LinkedIn post are critical skills today. Unfortunately, many reps in all age groups have issues with grammar and sentence structure, so providing access to a business writing course can have a big impact.
Here’s the process for defining your training priorities.
1. Define the skills needed to sell successfully for your company. (See my article on hiring sales reps for a list of skills and aptitudes needed today.)
2. Using the list created in #1, assess the skills of each rep using a scale from one to five, with five representing full proficiency in the skill.
3. Ask the reps to assess themselves using the same scale.
4. Perform a gap analysis and work with the rep to prioritize the skills that will have the biggest impact on performance.
5. Create a training plan for your team and for individual reps to work on their priorities. Your training plan should include:
the skill priorities
who will do the training or the online resource to be used
when the training will take place
how you will reinforce the training
how you will validate that your reps are incorporating their new skills into their daily selling practices.
Hopefully, you have a training budget that will allow for an outside resource if you need one. If you don’t have a budget, assume you can achieve a portion of the 50% net increase mentioned above from Brevet to build a business case to secure funding from your senior management or owner. Remember that your training will be much more impactful if paired with coaching as a reinforcement. Accountability, current rep sales levels, and rep bandwidth play a part in determining how much of an increase you will realize.
Q2: How should reps deal with the threats of a looming recession and customers who want to reduce their spending on print or marketing services?
If your reps aren’t already dealing with this, they probably will soon. Economic disruptions are scary for business leaders. Decision-makers are more cautious, tend to scrutinize their spending more thoroughly, and often delay decisions as they wait to see what the market does, what their peers are doing, and how their customers are reacting.
The good news is that to survive, businesses need to sell, nonprofits need to raise money, hospitals continue to treat patients, and consumers continue to spend money on things they need. Your customers will continue to buy what they need.
Sellers need to stop pitching and focus on solving critical business objectives. Reps must work harder to engage the stakeholders who own those critical objectives. Lower-level stakeholders or contacts typically don’t understand the business impact of what you sell and are more likely to focus on price. Senior-level stakeholders still have to drive their business forward no matter the market circumstances, so they care about results and ROI.
Reps should focus on getting to the right level and building a business case for their solution. It’s critical to understand the value of a lead, a customer, a student, or a donor. The risks of an accident (safety signage), lost customers, a lengthy process, or a communication error can be part of the business case. With this information, reps can help their customers understand the possible savings or the value your solution can create. The more detail the rep understands, the better their chance of crafting a cost-effective solution.
Reps also need to qualify each opportunity carefully and often. They have to ask tougher questions throughout the sales cycle to ensure enough value exists for the customer to make a change or spend their money. And reps must keep confirming where the problem they are fixing is on the customer’s priority list as the customer navigates the disrupted environment.
Reps simply can’t “out nice” their competition in a down economy. Reps must outsmart competitive reps, focusing their time on customers and opportunities that can close. Your reps have to use their time to focus on customers and opportunities where they can create tangible value for customers. And reps must use a sales process that helps customers understand why they should buy anything, buy it from them, and buy it now.
If you have questions to ask, send me a message on LinkedIn or via my email: [email protected] or use the contact form below to get in touch.
