Hotter Sales, Less Cold Calls --Sherburne

I've been in sales and marketing most of my career and was delighted to be invited to contribute to Printing Impressions on the subject of marketing in the printing industry. This column will appear every other month, and in it I will be offering advice, guidance and suggestions about how you can use marketing strategies to grow your business and make your sales- force more effective.

Peter Drucker, an expert in strategy and policy, once made the comment that the purpose of marketing is to eliminate the need for sales. While I'm certainly not as smart, experienced or well-known as the esteemed Mr. Drucker, I would take the liberty of modifying that comment for our industry to say that the purpose of marketing is to eliminate the need for cold calling.

Defining Marketing

According to Princeton University's WordNet, an online reference service, marketing is defined as "the commercial processes involved in promoting, selling and distributing a product or service." Most corporations employ marketing professionals and, in fact, those very marketing professionals are often the best sales contacts for you as you approach companies to peddle your wares. Most of the printed materials we produce on a daily basis can be categorized as marketing materials—brochures, sell sheets, advertising inserts, direct mail, and even business cards and annual reports. We are experts at producing these materials.

But how much time do we spend thinking about how they are used? And how many printing businesses actually employ someone who has marketing in his or her title, or actually put these tools to work for their own businesses?

A few months ago, I was speaking with Joe Truncale, CEO of the National Association for Printing Leadership (NAPL). He made a comment that was quite startling to me; he said, "I am waiting for the day that a print salesman will call me the day after a conference or meeting and ask how we did. They know when the event is—the date is on the piece of printing I bought from them. Imagine if a salesperson made that call. It has never happened to me."

This type of follow-up with a client to find out how the printed pieces we provided to them helped them achieve their business objectives is probably one of the simplest forms of marketing to implement. As Truncale points out, we have all the details. Companies pay a lot of money to get that level of detail about their customers and clients, and here we have it right at our fingertips! What a shame not to use the information for the benefit of both you and your clients.

But let's talk about another benefit of marketing: Getting new clients. Have you ever thought about what a sales call costs you? And how many of those sales calls end up being orders? Let's look at a simplistic example.

Assume your sales rep costs you $125,000 per year for salary, commissions, field expenses and benefits. There are approximately 223 work days in a year.

Assume your sales rep is making an average of four sales calls per day for an annual total of 892 sales calls. You have an average close rate of 35 percent.

Now it is just a matter of doing the math: $125,000/892 = $140 per sales call.

In this scenario, every sales call costs you $140. My guess is the actual number is much higher, especially with the way gasoline prices are going. And with a 35 percent close rate, that means that 580 of those sales calls never turn into orders, costing you about $80,000.

What if you could increase the close rate from 35 percent to 50 percent? In our scenario, that translates to a savings of $20,000, to say nothing of the incremental revenue you achieve from increased sales productivity.

What It's All About

This is exactly why you should care about marketing. To the extent you can pave the way for your salespeople through much less expensive direct mail, telemarketing, public relations and other means of raising awareness about the services your company offers and how those services can translate to a business benefit for clients, you will virtually eliminate the need to spend—in our example—$140 on a cold call that is likely to end up going nowhere.

Instead, by combining a blend of marketing and inside salespeople, an outside sales rep will have much more productive meetings with qualified prospective clients who already have information about your offerings and have expressed an interest in learning more.

Just like the old real estate saw about location, the three most important things about marketing are test, test, test! Start small with a mail campaign to a select list of prospects. Ideally, you should structure these mail campaigns in a series of three. Perhaps the first piece is an introductory postcard sent to your top 100 prospects delineating a specific product or service you offer that differentiates you from the competition.

Include a compelling quote from a satisfied customer. And include a call to action—for example, "to learn more call us," or "visit our Website." Address it to the specific contact you are trying to reach—the vice president of marketing, the director of training, or another executive in the organization who is interested in improving business results. And give them a reason to respond. "We sell printing" is probably not going to do the trick!

The second piece, mailed approximately two weeks after the first, should be related to the first, but add more reasons why they should respond. Maybe it is a discount on the first order or a compelling business reason why they should use your services as opposed to others that are available. Be sure to eliminate those who responded to the first mailing from the list for the second mailing. And add a stronger call to action.

The third piece, following the second by a week or two, might be in the form of a personal letter from the company president or the sales rep to the specific individual you have been communicating with in the first two parts of the campaign. In that letter, summarize the value you can bring to their business and indicate that someone will be calling them to schedule an appointment for further discussions. And then call as promised!

All of this can be done without using expensive sales resources. At the end of the test, look at the results. One metric you might look at is how many appointments were secured with new clients. Another is how many recipients voluntarily responded to the mailings. Learn from the experience and make the next one even better. Try it—and use this marketing approach to take cold calling out of the picture completely.

Let me know how it goes. I would love to hear your stories.

—Cary Sherburne

About the Author

Cary Sherburne is a well-known journalist, author and strategic marketing consultant working primarily with the printing and publishing industry. She is a frequent speaker at industry events, a regular contributor to industry publications and has written three books, available through the National Association for Printing Leadership (www.napl.org). Sherburne can be reached at Cary@SherburneAssociates.com.