Selling Design Services to Your Customers

March 22, 2012 by Leave a comment

Wedding invitation designed by Affinity ExpressWe often work with clients who offer printing services to small businesses or to consumers for business cards, brochures, letterheads, posters, invitation cards and so on. But how can you capture more printing work per customer and increase your profits? Sell higher-value design services!

Identifying customers who are in need of design services is the first step to selling. How do you do this? In four simple ways.

What do you see?

Your biggest clue is the document that the customer wants printed or copied.

  • What is the condition of the customer’s original document? Is it well-designed or do you see obvious problems: stretched or blurred images, difficult-to-read text?
  • If the customer wants a copy of a printed document, is the original in good shape? Does it have markings on it or things taped onto it?
  • Did the customer provide only hand-written copy that they want you to type up and create a document for?
  • Does the customer own a business, but doesn’t have a logo?

Read more of this post

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Finding the Right Prospects for a B2B Sale

April 8, 2011 by 1 Comment

Dartboard with mutliple targetsLast week, I received a call from a guy who wanted to know if I would be interested in buying two horses. While I live in the suburbs of Pittsburgh and we do have a few rural farms in the county, I’m sure my neighbors wouldn’t appreciate a couple horses running around our backyard! The seller told me he needed to sell his horses and was calling people in Pine Township to see if there was any interest. I told him I was not a prospect.

While the seller only wasted about two minutes for me, there are quite a few people who live in Pine Township, Pennsylvania. I can only imagine the amount of time this seller was spending to call people with no interest in his horses. After all, just because you want to sell something doesn’t mean there is anyone who will buy it.

Targeting the correct prospects for your products will increase your success rate. When I was in college I sold books door to door during the summer. They were reference books to help kids do better in class and improve reading. Note: this was pre-internet. Whenever I left one house, I would ask if the next couple of houses had kids. I did not want to waste time going to a home without children. This means every conversation enabled me to further refine my efforts. Read more of this post

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5 Tips for a Complex Sales Process

March 2, 2011 by 2 Comments

Sales meetingMy last post talked about the value of salespeople and how they help clients and their companies achieve important goals. This time I’ll focus on the role of salespeople in a relationship model, common to many business-to-business and outsourcing arrangements.

Salespeople must match the value of their product to the needs of their clients. This means all salespeople don’t perform the same activities or require exactly the same skills: it really depends on your industry and your company’s offerings and culture.

Most people are familiar with the transactional sales model. This is normally associated with low-priced, low-margin products in exchanges that require minimal effort by either side. The salesperson does little, if any, analysis on his or her clients and basically processes orders from those who are interested. There is no customer service after the sale (and sales and customer service are usually separate functions), nor is relationship-building required.

At the opposite end of the sales spectrum is the enterprise sale. This type of process is central to the creation and implementation of outsourcing partnerships and many other complex deals. It requires a high degree of effort from the salesperson to know their clients’ businesses and assess their needs. Decisions are typically made by teams versus individuals. Since a successful partnership is a long-term venture; trust, loyalty and confidence have to be established and maintained with all of the participants. And to forge a mutually-beneficial situation, the salesperson must be transparent in communications and execution so that all parties are comfortable and apprised on activities.

When entering into an enterprise-type sales process, there is potential for problems even if you are the best salesperson available to manage and facilitate the relationship.

Here is my advice. Read more of this post

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Salespeople–What Are They Good For?

January 12, 2011 by 3 Comments

Sales PersonSalespeople.  We all know several.

  • The slick car salesman twisting your arm about buying a car
  • The salesperson that leaves useless daily messages on your voice mail and fills up your in-box with email
  • The helpful clerk in the store locating an item for you
  • The doctor trying to convince you to take your medicine everyday
  • The teacher trying to tell your child the value of doing his or her homework

We encounter quite a few salespeople and, in various ways, we are all in sales—trying to “sell” our ideas to our family, friends and associates.

Salespeople often get a bad rep because of how they are portrayed in movies or because of bad personal experiences with pushy people.  However, salespeople  can be of help too.

What a good salesperson will do for you: Read more of this post

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