Business Management - Marketing/Sales

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.

Companies in today’s competitive market must be aggressive in their strategic marketing and climb to the top. It’s not smart to allow a lack of focus and consistency to creep into a marketing team’s campaign.

If you have any kind of difficulty with making apologies, please read this blog carefully because there will be plenty of times in your life when an apology is warranted. It will go a long way to repairing and even preventing damage.

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.

I believe that if you make quality sales calls using a process and make them with diligence, success in inevitable. Start every day with a plan. Run that plan daily. Repeat. You are doing your job.

Tracking the cost of each sales conversion will allow your printing company to determine the ROI of your promotional activities and consequently make more financially intelligent marketing decisions in the future. Using this data, you can easily calculate the “Lifetime Value of a Customer (or Lead)” and, consequently, the ROI of each marketing promotion.

For the past 10 years or so, marketers have been using SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) as an either/or choice. After much data gathering, it is becoming clear that most organizations should, at a minimum, consider both SEO and SEM in their overall marketing and branding efforts.

In-plant tours can be personal. You can see facial expressions of confusion or delight—or, God forbid, boredom. Virtual tours are tougher. Before you give a virtual tour of your e-commerce printing site, you need to visit that person’s website.

This is no existential discussion about our purpose here on earth. Today we are talking about landing a meeting with a coveted company, and what happens during and after said meeting. Too many of you are telling me that you manage to get the meetings, but then nothing comes of them.

Part of time management—a BIG part of time management, actually—is making the most of your selling day. Call it, “sales efficiency.” That is, are you making the most of the limited selling hours in any given selling day?