Choose Your Prospects Carefully With Intelligent Research
By: T.J. Tedesco
For: High Volume Printing
Published: August, 2001

No one would take their hard-earned money and aimlessly invest it in the last “hot tip” they heard, would they? Then, why do so many print sales representatives act like Don Quixote and give chase before knowing if there’s a good fit between what they’re selling and what their prospects need? In today’s information-rich business environment, such “selling” behavior relies on luck at best or is downright counterproductive at worst. Sounds a little like can’t-miss stock tips, right?

Activity for activity’s sake isn’t smart. It makes much more sense to qualify prospects before investing valuable face-to-face selling time. As sales managers know, it’s extremely frustrating to watch rookie sales representatives develop strong personal relationships only to discover that they’ve been nurturing the wrong person, the wrong account or both. This obvious waste of time can be avoided as long as proper research is done before setting foot near the wrong prospect’s door.

Increase your hit ratio by either improving your selling skills or being more selective about which prospects to pursue. Today, we’ll concentrate on the latter. Pros know that if there are sound business reasons for beginning the selling dance with a particular buying organization, the odds are greater that the people receiving the pitch will be more receptive about initializing a business relationship.

The Numbers

Sales reps should actively choose their prospects based on a reasonable amount of research; else they risk putting their economic future in Lady Luck’s hands. Consider these numbers. It usually takes between five and twelve visits to get to the first sale. If each sales call absorbs 1/2 hour preparation time, 15 to 45 minutes travel each way, 10 minutes waiting, somewhere between 1/2 to one hour of face-to-face selling and 1/2 hour for follow up activities, it’s reasonable to assume that each sales call consumes approximately 2-1/2 hours on average. If it takes eight sales calls to get to the first “yes,” an investment of about 20 hours is needed.

If your hit rate is great, say 50%, then there’s no problem – you’d gladly invest the 40 hours necessary to generate a solid new customer with six-figures or more of buying potential. But for many representatives, a 50% hit rate is an unrealistic dream. Either they keep on plugging away at prospects with marginal business potential or they give up too soon without making it to the fifth, eighth and eleventh sales calls. Without proper account qualification techniques, sales reps can have dismal account closing rates. If someone closes one in five accounts – which is probably not too far fetched – it will take an investment of 100 hours to land an initial order from one company.

Let’s try an alternative. Start with ten prospects. Invest two hours of research on each, identify the most likely two to pursue and devote the same 20 hours selling time to both. If you make good decisions, you will land one of them. This means your time investment would decrease to 60 hours for each new client landed. Which would you rather invest, 60 hours or 100 hours for the same payout? And, if so motivated, you can do a lot of your research during non-traditional selling hours, which saves you even more time. (Note: In practice, no one ever calls on just two new customers. Instead, they call on prospects with a much better business fit, which increases sales significantly.)

Systematic Research

Before thinking about which organizations to target, you must first become completely familiar with your selling proposition. If you have snazzy six- and eight-color 40” sheetfed equipment, don’t try to sell 100,000 2/C books. If you’re a web house, don’t go after sheetfed work and visa-versa. Occasionally, sales reps get lucky and win jobs based on personal chemistry, but this doesn’t work very often. Know what your company is good at and invest your time only with appropriate organizations.

Now, let’s move on to the three steps of information gathering that will help you select the right prospects for your company:

1) Market Identification: Do the companies you’re considering to target have the need for your services? If you sell non-heatset web printing, the odds are that you’re reasonably good at printing books, manuals and directories. What if you’re located in an association-heavy marketplace – like New York, Washington DC, or Chicago? There are a lot of large associations headquartered in these cities. Don’t they usually buy directories? Sure they do. Shouldn’t you at least consider specializing in printing for associations?

2) Company Identification and Analysis: Once you’ve identified a niche or two that deserve your focus, start turning over stones. Fortunately, the days of trudging to the library with a bunch of change for photocopies are long gone. Almost all significant prospects for medium- to large-format commercial printers have information-rich Web sites. Culling these self-provided repositories of knowledge gives sleuth sales/research professionals most of the information they need to begin the selling cycle.

Let’s continue with the association example. On the web, you can find a lot of information about associations in your local area. In addition to finding out how many members they have – which usually correlates reasonably well to the size of their mailing list – you can easily glean more pertinent information about management priorities, key people, association services and benefits, contact information and more. For example, if an association is listed with 50,000 members, they probably send some printed materials to their entire membership. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how large some of their production runs are.

3) Information Verification: The last step before visiting newfound prospects is to verify what you’ve learned. This requires research the traditional way … by telephone. During this phase, at a minimum, learn:

• The Four P’s of their business: Product, Price, Place (distribution channels) and Promotion.
• What types of printed and informational products they buy right now.
• What types of printed and informational products they intend on buying in the future.
• The companies that they outsource to and why. (Look beyond your printing competitors. For instance, if their office products supplier is their “best of breed,” find out what makes them so good and adopt some of their behavior, at least for this customer.)
• Their delivery and service expectations.
• The names of their key business influencers and their scopes of influence over the print buying activity.

If this sounds like traditional selling, you’re right. The only difference is instead of making hundreds of calls and visits, now you’re being more selective and using your selling time better. When face-to-face selling begins, the information you’ve gained will help you ask better questions and make a better impression.

Which print sales rep would you prefer to talk with? One that says, “We’re a great printing company. Nobody beats us on quality, service and price. Got anything for me to bid on today?” Or one that says, “I know you sell household goods to wholesalers, who in turn sell to retailers. My understanding is that wholesalers are being squeezed in your industry. Didn’t XYZ Co go out of business last week? Also, 20% of your business is coming from the South and increasing. How are these trends affecting the printed information you need to provide?”

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There is little room in people’s hectic business lives for second-rate sales efforts. It’s crucial that sales professionals carefully choose their prospects before going crazy trying to put near-fruitless accounts in the win-column. Does this mean that the cold calling era is over? Hardly. It’s just that it’s different. A lot of tedious and time-consuming pre-Internet account qualification activities that once were necessary no longer are. Because research was so painful a decade ago, a lot of sales reps skimped in this vital area. It wasn’t so bad then, because many reps weren’t prioritizing research. With today’s easy research tools, this is no longer true. Now, lazy sales reps will get left behind. Maybe they should play the market instead of wasting their prospects’ time.

T.J. Tedesco is a “hands-on” marketing, sales, coaching and training consultant to the post press industry. He is the author of Binding, Finishing & Mailing: The Final Word, and Win Top-of-Mind Positioning, both published by GATFPress and available at Amazon.com. T.J. can be reached at (301) 294-9900 or tj@growsales.com.

7. GIFs. Don’t use a lot of moving “Gif” images. While they were considered OK in the web’s early days, the novelty has worn off.

8. Frames. “Frames” is going the way of the dinosaur. Although frames anchors parts of your website for easy navigation, they make it hard to properly apply bookmarks, which makes return visits needlessly difficult.

9. Search Engine Registration. Boost your web traffic by registering your site with the major search engines. The old days of waiting for web “spiders” to index your site are long gone. Today, manual registration is necessary. With the notable exception of Yahoo.com, registration rarely costs anything and is well worth the time investment.

10. Cross Marketing. Once your site is up, market it well. Make your website address as visible as your phone number. Every piece of corporate communication you send should include this web address. Consider earmarking a portion of your promotional budget to advertise your site.

Have you visited top tier e-commerce sites like Amazon.com, Dell.com and the major airline recently? They are all information-packed, highly functional and intuitive.

Marketing Online

Online “banner” advertising is a resounding bust. However, opt-in broadcast e-mail isn’t. This promising technology could be quite valuable to you, as long as you use it properly. Here are the top three tips for successful broadcast e-mail marketing. Number 1) “Opt-in” means that recipients actively choose to receive your specific information. This is also tip two and three.

As long as you send your e-mail to a true opt-in list (100% internally generated), no one will consider you a “spammer.” Opting-into a broadcast e-mail program isn’t too different from subscribing to a magazine. People don’t always read magazines cover-to-cover, even though they’ve chosen to subscribe. Just like magazines, whether or not people read your e-mail depends partly on what’s happening in their lives at the time of the e-mail’s arrival. Some will be read and some won’t. Even the ones that delete your e-mail without reading it will associate you as being a valuable provider of information. Send e-mail often enough to win top-of-mind-position, but not too often that people ask to be removed from your list.

Unsolicited (non opt-in) broadcast e-mail is “spamming.” In today’s tough privacy climate, spammers subject themselves to electronic retaliation of all sorts. Avoid opening yourself to the spamming charge by creating your own true opt-in-only e-mail database. Don’t take a shortcut and buy e-mail addresses. Ask all key business influencers at current or prospective customers if they would like to receive your e-tips.

Since you want to gain access to as many business influencers at appropriate companies as possible, collect e-mail addresses for people in the following functions: Estimating; customer service; sales; production; purchasing; and, management. Then, put up a page on your website with your new information, get a broadcast e-mail program (i.e., MailKing) and create a short message with a hyperlink to it. Don’t send large e-mail messages that require excessive downloading time because this is annoying and may trigger a flood of removal requests. Remind recipients that they’ve asked to be included on your opt-in e-mail list and provide instructions how to remove themselves if necessary.

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E-commerce has a bright future. Bill Gates is fond of saying that people overestimate change in a two-year period, but underestimate it in ten. One thing’s for sure: E-commerce will continue to have a tremendous impact on the way we do business. Let’s get started sooner than later.

T.J. Tedesco is a “hands-on” marketing, sales, coaching and training consultant to the post press industry. He is the author of Binding, Finishing & Mailing: The Final Word, and Win Top-of-Mind Positioning, both published by GATFPress and available at Amazon.com. T.J. can be reached at (301) 294-9900 or tj@growsales.com.