Changing Transactional Selling into Consultative Selling

SOUTHBOROUGH, MA—July 12, 2007—Sales forces that simply communicate value to customers are doomed to fail. Sales professionals have to create value for their customers in order to survive and thrive in today’s marketplace.

Moving sales forces from transactional-based selling to consultative-based selling is critical to the success of printing and graphic communications companies.

How to create customer value through consultative selling is the focus of “Transitioning a Successful Sales Team” by Jerry Scher at this year’s Northeast Regional Print Management Conference, scheduled for Sept. 23-25th at the Cranwell Resort in Lenox, Mass.

The conference is hosted by Printing Industries of New England and co-hosted by Printing Industries Alliance and the Graphic Arts Association. Together, the three trade associations represent 1,000 printing and graphic communications companies across the northeastern United States.

Architect & implementer of effective sales programs

Jerry Scher, past president of PRISCO, Printer’s Service Company, has more than 40 years of experience in business management, sales and marketing. He has led an array of business development programs to help organizations improve selling techniques. A dynamic educator and seminar leader, Scher will fill the pockets and notepads of attendees with ideas on how to transition their sales forces to be more effective over the next decade. Scher will dissect how transactional selling is commodity-based and focused on price and an outdated and ineffective method for businesses to gain market share. In a properly executed consultative selling model, a customer would pay for the sales representative’s time due to the rep’s expertise in the service they are selling.

In transactional selling, customers know what they want and feel they don’t need to be educated on a topic. In a consultative approach, the customer may not even know there is a problem — such as internal production redundancies or poor workflow — and needs to be educated. This is where a consultative sales rep creates value for clients.