Published in:
American Printer, November 1993
It's been said that roughly 15 percent of the largest 500 graphic arts companies during 1989 are no longer in business or are unrecognizable as a result of mergers. Ironically, this trend should be encouraging to the balance of our industry's firms. After all, it's a small but growing testimony that company size or iron-on-the-floor don't, in themselves, ensure a company's prosperity or success.However, regardless of business conditions, certain companies in our industry have steadily grown over the past few years and been profitable. As a general observation, these companies have a clearer sense of what they are doing right — and for whom — and what they need to improve. Most of them also generate this information through an ongoing dialog with their customers, employees and suppliers.
Prospecting for new business should be a discrete process, but where should the process begin and who will offer accountable direction?
Recently, I spent a grueling week with attendees at a week-long industry-specific sales and marketing training session. Some 12 companies with multiple attendees were represented through owners, sales managers and sales reps. The longest attendee tenure in the graphic arts was over 30 years. The shortest was two months. All were attending for purposes of building professional and customer development performance.
Critical questions too seldom asked and pursued by senior management and sales managers include: "If our best customers could buy cheaper, why don't they?" and "Why do our best customers really buy from us?"
Interestingly, not one company represented had a written statement of its company's differentiation to guide and direct customer development efforts. Such a statement, had one existed, would have included a detailed outline of what markets and products should be developed or avoided, with an accompanying explanation detailing the reasons why.
Part of the industry's testimony to poor company direction and resulting poor performance lies in the fact that most companies treat dollars from all customers as equal. However, a review of results at consistently profitable and successful companies proves that nothing could be further from the truth.
For example, sales reps — often without a clear and understood direction — independent of management, usually decide which prospects will be developed. Prospect development and estimating resources, untracked, can be poured into a prospect for months before management evaluates the situation's merits or a first order of unknown value is forthcoming. Bottomline results too often are predictable, but not necessarily desired.
Again, we need to consider what are the detailed qualifications for prospects worthy of our company's best efforts?
In addition, most companies, regardless of size, do not require prospect credit checks. They take too much trouble or are considered too costly to execute, especially before a first sales appointment, claim many printers today. If, however, prospect development resources were tracked with the same passion as actual job costs, there would be a radically different level of professional sales management operating in most companies.
We can stand in a chanting prayer circle and confirm that we're getting beaten by unfair foreign competition, infidel competitors who don't know their costs or outrageous buyer demands from amateurs who don't know what they are doing. Regardless of the rationale, customers should be expected to critically evaluate what they are paying for what they are receiving.
Customers also should be expected to critically evaluate and eliminate non-improving vendors (increasingly through formal vendor evaluations) for the purposes of increasing their own companies' performances. Not all customers evaluate our performances equally, and our experience with pricing pressures and bottom-line results indicate that industry prospecting efforts should reflect this fact.
Critical questions too seldom asked and pursued by senior management and sales managers include: "If our best customers could buy cheaper, why don't they?" and "Why do our best customers really buy from us?" Instructively, if senior management and sales management don't have these critical, directional answers available in writing, why should they expect front-line account development personnel to be any better informed?
If a supplier's customer development team doesn't know, can't specifically articulate or hasn't been directed as to which customers are exceptional and predictable at delivering elevated perceived buyer value, then why should a printer expect a buyer's organization to know why and where it should buy?
Developing a company's differentiation and direction are senior management issues. Once established, it is the job of sales management to deliver the customers, with some frequency, for the benefit of all.
