Your Perspective Matters!

Credit: Bill Gillespie

Her Ladyship and I dated for six years before we got married. We were married eight years before we had kids. We knew what we liked, how we wanted our home, what mattered and how we enjoyed spending our time. We were accustomed to order and liked it.

We had a nice home. We’d taken time to furnish it with the best of everything. Our dinnerware, tables, chairs, sofa, television and loveseat were top shelf. Life was perfect.

We decided to have kids. A daughter came first. Four years later there was a son. Everything we thought we knew was gone. Everything we thought mattered, didn’t. Two kids changed our perspective on every single, solitary thing.

At first, I resisted. I fretted over every spilled glass or stain. I tried to protect my stuff from my kids. I was like a lot of stupid people. I had everything out of order. I was exactly backwards. I created lots of stress.

Fast forward: We bought a lake house. We furnished it with lake style stuff. We had fun with it. Everything was campy. Nothing was fancy. We were older and had different values.

A favorite piece of furniture was our kitchen table. Guests were tossed a sharpie and asked to sign their name. Some did more than that. There are limericks, jokes, dates, signatures and precious messages. Our perspective on value changed. We grew to focus on the gift of friendship over the pristine condition of a table.

Now what does this have to do with business? How does your perspective influence your numbers? Answer: Your Focus Determines What You See.

When you start to write orders, you’re all about the task. What was I hired to produce? When is it due? What is my budget? I want to deliver exactly what was specified. I need to avoid any sort of mistake.

That’s great. But project management isn’t selling. Account management isn’t selling either. If this is where you stop you can only be a price. Your value can’t be separated from your bid.

Account management is only part of the sales assignment. It’s the starting point. It’s setting things up just like Her Ladyship and I did before we had kids. It’s specifications.

Total selling requires leadership. It’s possibility sharing. It’s full of “what if” or “have you thought of this” or “I wonder if you might find this valuable.” Selling is about changing client perspectives. It’s possibilities. It isn’t just problem dodging (project management).

I talk with reps every week that claim to be imaginative sellers. Then, they mention bidding. They retreat to price. They do this because price is really what they depend on to sell stuff.

You can tell how dependent you are on price by how early it comes up in sales conversations. Intrigued clients never bring it up. They talk about their idea. They ask how you might make this happen or that happen. They don’t ask for budgets until they like what they hear and are emotionally ready pull a trigger. They want to know what their idea will cost, not whether you’re the low bid.

Leadership style reps keep price in their hip pocket. They fuel the idea conversation. They excite clients with possibilities. They don’t talk about money. They talk about how cool the project is going to be.

Trust me on this. Get in touch with what the client wants. Lead them to better solutions. Make their printing work better for them and your price will simply be the budget they need to approve.

The lake house table is the only thing we own that our kids want. We have boats, cars, precious family treasures and two houses full of furniture. The kids don’t care. They argue over who deserves the table. Your Perspective Matters.

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.