Business Management - Marketing/Sales

Due to current market conditions, many business people find themselves working on their own marketing campaigns and branding programs. If you find yourself in this situation, here are three things you need to know about doing self-promotion:

After experiencing life as a sales rep, a sales manager and a president, I am now recruiting in the printing industry. To be honest, the saddest part of my job is working with the so-called “old school” sales reps.

Printers who struggle to operate at full capacity would likely find it advantageous to partner with a print management firm. Such firms can act as a sales channel that funnels a steady pipeline of work optimized for your manufacturing platform.

At PaperSpecsGallery.com, we believe that a great business card is your best sales tool. Case in point: Neenah Paper typically creates a unique business card for each major product launch. For the Classic line relaunch, the company literally glued strips of its 10 Perfect colors onto an Epic Black cover sheet. This card truly is a selling tool in its own right!

As soon as I got wind of this movie, starring Brad Pitt and recounting the 2002 Oakland A’s pioneering use of sabermetrics, I knew I would get a blog out of it. Here are five lessons I think we can all take away from this story:

We sat next to each other at an industry event, enjoying a nice dinner and learning about cross-media marketing. Then I got around to the one question I was dying to ask: How do you promote your services?

One of the most common questions I get from printing industry salespeople is simply this: “Margie, can you tell me how to get buyers’ attention?” Let’s face it, print sales reps today need a brand new bag of tricks and tips to get noticed by prospects.

TJ, your “Take no prisoners” column on sales compensation in the April issue brought back a lot of memories and really got me thinking about the subject. As you know, the subject matter is a lightning rod for controversy regardless if you’re setting up a new plan, changing an existing plan, or writing about it for Printing Impressions. But allow me to take a walk down memory lane.

A sales rep walks into a buyer's office for an appointment. As the buyer is speaking, the rep is doing what all reps do—scanning the buyer’s desk looking for clues and information to be used later. Amazingly, sitting right in front of the buyer is a competitor’s proposal for a job that the sales rep is about to quote.

Using certain key words—in sales letters, in advertisements, during sales calls—can help you nudge your prospects toward a sale. Thanks to decades of trial-and-error by past marketers, we now know which words are most likely to inspire prospect action.