Sales Efficiency Is a Must —Sherburne
The name of Kendig’s company is WinningStance Corp., and he operates it in partnership with a childhood friend who is managing partner of 2Win!Global (www.2winglobal.com). He provides Intellectual Property (IP) around how to more effectively demonstrate your product and uses psychological techniques to help customers differentiate themselves from their competitors when doing a demonstration. The objective is to make you “memorable.”
Now, you may ask yourself, as I did, what this has to do with selling printing. And my answer would be a great deal. If you are effectively selling printing, have migrated your sales efforts away from the print buyer, and are now calling on document owners and creators such as the marketing department, you are selling them a product or a program. When you bring relevant samples to them or take them on a shop tour, you are conducting a product demonstration.
Let’s face it—these document owners, despite what you may think, are not buying printing. They really could care less (in most cases) what type of press you have, how many lines or dots per inch it prints, whether it is ink- or toner-based, or how many sheets per hour you can crank through it.
What are they buying? They are buying brand awareness. They are buying business results. They are buying tools to attract buyers for their products and services, or to drive attendance at shows or events, or even to drive eyeballs to their Websites—to use a very ’90s term! So the conventional method of walking in cold to an account with an equipment list and a sample book simply is not effective with these folks. In fact, you may not even be able to gain an appointment using the traditional approach.
But if you take an approach such as the one Kendig is teaching, you will have a totally different response to your sales efforts. The key teaching he puts forward is that a demonstration, whether it is a plant tour or showing off your pitch book, is not about your product. In reality, it is about your customer’s business process and how your product or service relates—how it can solve business problems for them.
