July 2008 - Encourage Your Non-Sales Employees to Contribute to Your Sales Process

Printing company employees without direct sales responsibilities often underestimate their ability to help with the sales effort. In challenging economic times, like the one we’re in now, it’s imperative that graphic arts companies unearth all potential business leads.

Most companies have direct knowledge of all the prospects they need to be wildly successful. Yes, we mean it – wildly successful. The problem is this knowledge lies buried within the minds of people who don’t think of sales first. Instead, they’re bearing down and taking care of what’s in their official job description. The management challenge is to incorporate sales support into everyone’s area of responsibility.

Like gold, sales knowledge needs to be mined within your organization. Your customer service representatives, estimators, production managers, schedulers and other non-salespeople know things about your customers and prospects that you and the sales team don't. Important but casual conversations occur everyday. For example, one of your CSRs might be told of a large project that’s coming for bid soon. If he or she hasn’t been trained to transfer this knowledge for follow up, you’re likely going to miss this sales opportunity.

Your employees talk, read industry publications and have friends and family members working at companies that buy printing. Provide an internal structure to make it easy for them to help. Expensive? Not at all: a public pat on the back is enough to encourage knowledge sharing.

Your salespeople are trained to always ask for the order, right? Apply the same principles internally and tap all resources by asking everyone within your organization for potential sales opportunities. Collect this information in a centralized location and develop a system to harvest this low hanging and very tasty fruit.

What Can Grow Sales, Inc., Do for You?
At Grow Sales, Inc., we specialize in finding the right promotional mix for each graphic arts client, and making sure it’s executed. Since 1996, we have provided full-service marketing, public relations, web and graphic design and sales support for our clients. With our help, this could be a banner year for your company.

Back to E-Tips