Business Management - Marketing/Sales

In case you haven't been outside lately, it's August; the temperature is 97° and the humidity is 97 percent. These are the Dog Days of summer. These days are about lethargy, lemonade and lots of air conditioning. Lots of your brother and sister print salespeople just stop working in August. Why not? The boss is at the shore. Some salespeople rationalize that the print buyers seem to have crawled underground. These salespeople say, "Why should I work?" Most of the buyers are backpacking in the mountains or scuba diving in the cool waters of the Caribbean. Well, I aim to do something about all this

I will be 59 this month and I'm getting crotchety. Lots of things annoy me. Our era of excess communications annoys me. Everyone, including many adolescents whose voices haven't changed, have cell phones. Cell phones really annoy me in airports and on airplanes. I was on a flight recently where the guy next to me, the people in front of me and behind me were all speaking on cell phones just before takeoff.

The April 2, 2001, edition of Time magazine featured a cover story titled "What Scares You?" The subtitle was, "Don't be afraid to read about the promising new cures for hundreds of phobias." Well, I have to tell ya, the title scared the bejeebers out of me. I was mysteriously compelled to read it. The editors at Time must have a huge research staff because the article listed several hundred phobias alphabetically. Just listen to some of the "H" phobias. There is hedonophobia or the fear of feeling pleasure. Then there is heliophobia or the fear of the sun. And then there is hemophobia, which

My writing license requires that I write a serious column once every 10 years. This is it. Lots of times managers tell me, "Mañana Man, I copied your column last month and gave it to all of our salespeople." Now this is your chance, salespeople. Copy this column and give it to your boss.

About 247 Silicon Valley smart guys dreamed up some e-commerce Internet sites to sell different stuff to printers and/or print buyers in order to get a lot of money. It really wasn't so much about selling anything. That really didn't matter. It was mainly about getting the money. The smart guys called their schemes "business models." Business model is smart guy terminology. The smart guys didn't know, however, that printers work hard to come by their money and don't part with it easily. Printers have payrolls due every Friday and the paper companies want their money on time. So most printers walk around worried about

This is a printing salesperson psychotherapy column. I have to write these every so often because I get bagfuls of letters, gigabytes of e-mails and memory-filling voice mails from distraught and depressed print salespeople. You've got hard jobs, and some of you have stupid bosses and even stupider competitors. These conditions can create considerable anxiety for even the strongest of psyches. The stock market tanked. Mr. Greenspan waited too long to reduce interest rates. The economy has been headed in the wrong direction. The presidential election results in Florida had to be counted, recounted and litigated, and all of the TV coverage sickened

CHAMBERSBURG, PA—Some established GPO vendors maintained their place in the latest list of the GPO's Top 50 volume producers. Keeping the top spot was Montebello, CA-based Monarch Litho, which saw a 27 percent increase in its winnings to nearly $33 million. News Printing of Claysburg, PA, also increased its GPO volume and ranks again as the second-largest producer of printing for the federal government. While familiar faces to this list are prevalent from top to bottom, there are always some new faces. Two examples: Colonial Press International, a commercial sheetfed printer in Miami, and Larco International, a laser imaging and mail house located in

All the debates on television between the Republican and Democrat spin masters during the presidential debates and then, subsequently, their endless debates about the debatable election results got me to thinking how far down we Americans have fallen in the graceful and gentle art of conversation. We Americans have become lousy conversationalists. Even Gore and Bush seemed challenged by this most basic form of human communication. You would think the two presidential candidates that represent the two major political parties of the greatest country in the world would be master conversationalists—good at attentively listening to an opponent and then responding. Shouldn't they also be our most

It's the time of the year when, no matter what your beliefs, we seem to do our best self-examination. I know that I do and lots of times I don't like what I examine about myself. I sure hope that your year-end introspection enables you to count many accomplishments in your careers, a great sense of company satisfaction, real pride in your industry and, most of all, a variety of contributions that you've made to the community and world that you occupy.

This column is number 176. It marks the beginning of my 17th year writing for Printing Impressions. I've written 11 columns per year for 16 years. (The PI columnists get every July off.) My columns contain about 1,250 words and the average word is about six letters. Oh, once in awhile I'll use a 14-letter word or some 12-letter words, but then I'm more of a four- to six-letter word writer. Six-letter words are about 1⁄2˝, so when you throw in the spaces between words, all the words in all of my columns would stretch about two miles. Or, another perspective is that