I Don’t Like Change!

Credit: Eloise Steele and Tiffany Fox

“Everything is in constant motion. Accept and expect constant change. The unhappiest people I know can’t embrace change. They’re convinced that what they learned up until a certain point in their lives is all they need to know. They waste time looking backward and poison their environment with a toxic longing for the good old days.

If you expect to excel in the working world…any world, you have to know that things will change. People will leave the place you work. New folks will arrive with their own ideas. Companies will be sold. Others will close. Technology will make some services obsolete while inventing demand for others and new skills. Focusing on the why solutions exist over what they are at a specific moment will help you accept necessary change and make you more valuable to your employer and the marketplace.”

I wrote these words for an article six years ago. Recent conversations make me reach for them again, today. How does the old saying go? “The only thing consistent is constant change.” If I missed a word here or there, please forgive me.

Recent Conversation: A company owner was complaining of shrinking sales. Some of his customers are printing less. His numbers are off. His ink has gone from black to gray, to pink and finally bright red. He needs more work.

I asked about target accounts. He doesn’t have any. I asked about target sectors. Nope. He doesn’t have any of those either. His VP of Sales is really a transaction management guy. There is no strategy. There are no targets. There is no plan. But they need sales.

I asked about existing clients. “Do they have more work than you’re enjoying? Is there business across the hall that could be low hanging fruit?”

Response: “I don’t know. We only know the work we see. We close most of what we quote. We don’t know anything about other departments.”

This conversation, while mind-numbing is more common than you might think. We get busy managing business and don’t plan for change. We allow sales leadership to become project management. We set aside planning, target identification and research. We fumble the very things that made us successful in the first place.

Biz owners, your sales leadership owes you a profile on every account you enjoy. It should be part of your planning. You should know where the business is, who has it now and what you need to do to win it for yourself. Sales guys, you owe this to the boss.

I don’t care how solid your business seems to be. Change is coming. The people you sell to are in constant motion. The people they sell to are in constant motion. The people you depend on to sell for you are in constant motion. Change is gonna happen.

In the mid 80’s I was rocking along with $3.5 million in annual sales. Our company’s two largest accounts were mine. I learned about most of my transactions when invoices hit my desk. It was awesome.

One Monday morning my best contact at my largest account told me he had purchased a pest control company in Florida. He was moving away to kill bugs. His replacement was an adversary of mine. $1.5 million was gone in a single phone call.

Two days later my contact at a soft drink giant told me he was leaving too. He went to work selling print. He became a competitor of sorts. This loss was larger than Monday’s.

It was a bad week. I had a family at home. I was living high on the hog. My new income couldn’t support our lifestyle. My personal ink was red.

Fast Forward: I learned from it. I rebuilt. The disruption was temporary. But it could have been avoided.

Change is constant. Don’t pretend it can’t happen to you. Plan. Prospect. Profile clients. Know where the business is. Have a strategy for winning it and demand updates from sales. You aren’t leading your business if you don’t.

Photo: Embrace Change. Don’t fight it.

The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with Printing Impressions. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of Printing Impressions. Artificial Intelligence may have been used in part to create or edit this content.