Harris DeWese

These horrid conditions in the ’80s led me to think about the role of the “print salesperson” and what led to the broad lack of success for many and the soaring success of a few. It occurred to me that there are four types of salespeople.

Ethos is your ability to cause buyers to believe you can satisfy their needs. Pathos refers to the salesperson capturing the emotions of the buyer. Logos depends on the salesperson’s ability to appeal to the buyer’s sense of reason.

The aim of a sales conversation is that both people win. The customer obtains a new supplier and the salesperson gets a new customer. Those early sales conversations form the framework for all future communication. The media are destroying the art of good conversation.

I used to believe that you called on a prospect and provided a “presentation.” You began by telling about your employer and what the company could do. This put a huge onus on the salesperson to speak in an organized, interesting, entertaining, complete and persuasive monologue.

I was sitting out back on Saturday, the fated May 21. I began to think about previous doomsday predictions and how they had all failed. Then WHAMO! I had a much better idea. Why not create special, non-cataclysmic days for positive purposes?

These blogs on planning are boring. I’m bored writing them. I’ll bet you are bored reading them. Maybe the best way to demonstrate strategy is to write a detailed action plan for one of the strategies from the previous blog.

Strategy is one of those words that big-shot CEOs, consultants and MBA professors like to throw at us. They try to make the word seem to be something exotic. Strategy is only a synonym for the word “how.”

The more informed and measured a salesperson can be, they better he will perform. An ideal sales objective should read, “I am aiming to improve my sales for the year 2011 from $2.0 million to $2.4 million. In addition, I will improve my profit margin by a minimum of 15 percent for the year.”

Planning is difficult. It’s tedious hard work. It wears me out just thinkin‘ about it. It works best when you follow certain steps, and our next step is listing your personal sales strengths and weaknesses.

In this session, you will begin to develop individual sales plans for the balance of 2011. If you believe that you already have a plan in place, I hope you will come to understand that static plans are worthless.

There is a strong correlation between advanced sales planning skills and superior sales performance. High-performance printing salespeople have developed highly personalized, but also systematic, planning habits. For the most part, these sales planning skills were developed by accident.

Companies with sales of more than $100 million tend to be procedural. They often have purchasing agents, perhaps even purchasing personnel who just specialize in graphic arts. Medium-sized companies are less rigid, so the CEO and senior management are more accessible to the aspiring prospector.

You should be investing a minimum of 30 percent of your time building a prospect database, updating your prospect intelligence, conceiving strategies to penetrate accounts and implementing your strategies. Spend some time listing all the reasons to call prospects.

I know this will be hard to accept, but 71.9 percent of our industry’s salespeople do a lousy job of describing their companies in an introductory 2-3 minute monologue. Trust me, I track this kind of stuff.

What if you are an active listener, but the buyer is not? That’s where flexibility and fit come in. Flexibility and fit refer to matching or fitting your style of communication to another person’s to improve the accurate exchange of information.