Business Management - Marketing/Sales

Scores of articles, essays and columns have already been written about the new millennium, the old millennium and the evil-dreaded Y2K catastrophe. You are a reader of this column, and that means you are one erudite dude or dudette, as the case may be. Surveys have proven that the Mañana Man's readers are more enlightened than the readers of, say, George Will, Garrison Keillor or Andy Rooney. No writer, however, has devoted so much as a sentence to the people, the events or the historic implications of selling in the years ranging from 1000 to 1999. It's as if our selling profession didn't exist

BY ERIK CAGLE One by one, the staff of Printing Impressions paraded past tables of submissions for the magazine's 13th annual Self-Promotion Contest. As the members perused over the quality promotional pieces, the subject of judging criteria was brought up. What exactly makes one submission stand out from another? It's a good question, one marketing departments and creative gurus have long pondered when developing ideas to tout the virtues of their respective companies. Making matters more difficult, the promotions are being created for marketing in the commercial printing industry, the equivalent of chefs being asked to bring a covered dish to a pot luck

Wow! Am I totally excited! I just participated in the most momentous printing event of this millennium! Only 17 people were present: a court reporter, 15 print buyers and me. The print buyers work in the health care, education, financial services, advertising, automobile, consumer goods and agricultural industries. Collectively, the print buyers have more than 240 years of print purchasing experience for an average of more than 16 years each. As a group, they will purchase nearly $70 million in printing this year. If they bought all that printing from one company, it would rank 89th on Printing Impressions' Top 500 list. There were no printers present

There's A dirty little secret among some of the country's largest printers. It's not something they all want their competitors to know. And it has to do with the most overlooked part of the print stream. Their secret? The bindery can sell print jobs. Traditionally, the bindery was seen only as a necessary evil, the unpopular room tucked in a corner of the plant, where the product was finished once all the "real work" of designing and printing was done. Print buyers would look for companies with the most advanced prepress areas and pressrooms, and then expect that the product would be cut, folded

A senior manager of a large printing equipment manufacturer called me back in July. He was inviting me to speak to his U.S. sales force at Graph Expo in Chicago this month. The speech was to be only 30 minutes, and I was going to Graph Expo anyway, so I said, "sure." Now, of course, I'm known as "old rhetoric breath," and I can talk about anything for 30 minutes. I can give you 30 minutes on the best timing, the breathtaking beauty and the proper execution of the suicide-squeeze bunt in baseball. In a half-hour, I can easily discuss the virtues of North

A few issues back, I wrote a column about how I'm golf impaired. It's actually worse than that. I'm golf challenged. In fact, I don't play the game, period. I do garden and, because I'm out in the sun, people think I have a golfer's tan. I'm 57, I have a tan and I'm an investment banker to the printing industry.

On the last day of June, I attended an out-of-town cocktail reception and dinner with about 20 printing company owners. June 30th was my 57th birthday, and the printers presented me a birthday cake, an XXL baseball warm-up jacket and a baseball cap. Of course, they asked me if I'd made a wish before I blew out the candles. One printer guessed that I had wished for about six more printing industry consolidators, since I'm in the investment banking business of representing the sellers of printing companies. More consolidators would mean more competition for the companies that I represent. That would have been a selfish

In my March 1999 column, I included a print salesperson survey and promised to send a magic "sales power" paperweight to everyone who completed and mailed in the survey. I hope I never weaken and make this kind of offer again. The mailman has been bringing in bags of surveys, and I am bone-tired from wrapping these little boxes. Furthermore, in a post-column wave of euphoric largess, I decided to send every survey respondent a Sean McArdle audio tape and my book, "Now Get Out There and Sell Something!" So, this whole stupid survey idea has cost me a bunch of money, and I had to tabulate

This column is way out on the edge. It falls in the category of "experimental prose." It has not been approved for general use by any government agencies. As a matter of fact, if you are . . . 1. pregnant; 2. suffering from high blood pressure; 3. wearing mittens to prevent thumb sucking; 4. wearing mittens to prevent scratching your eyes out; or 5. wearing a straight jacket . . . then, you probably should excuse yourself from this column now. Come to think of it, if you are reading this from a hospital bed, ring the nurse button now and have this magazine incinerated with the medical

We are all at risk of staying too long. Whether as a guest or in a business meeting or even, I suppose, as a columnist. Knowing when it's time to leave may be no less important for columnists than it is for boxers and ballplayers. For me, that time has come. I haven't lost a step, and I'm still at the top of my game. But nothing erodes desire and competence faster than the loss of motivation. I have sold my business. Confident that my former clients are now in the strong and very capable hands of Charlotte Seligman, my colleague of many years, I am