The Average Chief Marketing Officer is Replaced After Two Years: Why That’s Great News for Printers

Second, the players are always changing. Because selling outside the purchasing department requires knowing decision-makers, influencers, gatekeepers, and others, a more complex network of relationships needs to be maintained. Understanding that network and nurturing those relationships takes time and effort. Many printers feel that they should keep selling to purchasing departments because they perceive that there is greater stability and certainty in those relationships, and the costs of selling using other strategies may have greater risk and higher, uncertain costs, with longer sales cycles. What they give up in lower selling prices, they feel, is balanced by lower and more predictable sales costs. (What some in the industry consider to be a lack of sophistication among printers in selling and marketing may actually be an economic decision based on a realistic acknowledgment of their inability to execute a grander strategy; but that is a topic for another time). Indeed, the marketplace rewarded such production-oriented management in the past, but things are not that way anymore. The marketplace does not reward such activity today. In fact, multi-tier selling is critical in this environment, because it offers a more balanced view of the client and provides for additional relationships that maintain communication when there is a change of command. This can benefit the incumbent as well as a new salesperson, when the changing of the guard opens the window for new opportunities.