What Does Your Customer Want?

Credit: Bill Gillespie

Do you know what your customer wants? Can you spot sales triggers? Is your talk track focused on the customer or your resume and company services?

This is a pet topic of mine. I watched it all through my sales career. Clients and customers engage in what I call parallel conversations.

The client has objectives. The print rep has equipment and service. The rep talks about how their portfolio and experience equips them to be the best source. Their story is virtually identical to every other printer.

Language is invested but communication isn’t really happening. Typically, the client wraps up the meeting saying, “I’ll keep you in mind” or “I’ll reach out next time I have something to price.” In most cases the rep has missed clues (sales triggers) that could make them stand out.

Years ago, I spent some time with an advertising agency owner. He explained his own sales process. He said, “the unavoidable delay in making a sale is waiting on prices. We can’t move our process forward without collecting budgets for ideas we want to pitch. Print reps think we’re ready to place orders but we’re just getting started. It’s a slow and expensive process.”

A few months later I joined a rep on a sales call. We were seeing a college marketing group. These guys controlled more than 7 figures in print.

The lady running the meeting said something similar to my agency pal. She described their process. “We take a request from a department. We brainstorm on ideas to solve the problem. We go out and collect prices. We adjust ideas to fit budgets and collect more prices. We continue this process until we arrive at a solution we can sell and a price our client can afford.”

How does the printer help? They provide prices and revisions. Hopefully, in a hurry.

I asked the question, “If we could build you a dynamic calculator, would that help? If we could build you a tool that let you price ideas on the fly, would that speed up your sales process? Would that make you more successful with your internal clients?”

The meeting turned on a dime. The lady in charge asked, “can you do that? Is something like that possible? It would change our lives. Everything would happen faster.”

Fast Forward: We built the calculator, put it behind a login and bottled up a contract. The sales trigger wasn’t price or equipment. It was our solution to their workflow problem. We snatched the work away from a much larger and better equipped company.

Spotting sales triggers is critical to elegant solutions. It takes listening. Getting in touch with the world your client lives in is more important than your new press or gadget.

Here’s the brutal truth. Clients aren’t worried about buying good print, winning good service or finding the best price. They know how to shop and buy those things. In fact, their supplier choice is 80% made before they ask for numbers. Buying is the easy part.

Here’s another example. I sold 19 boxes for more than $50,000 because we learned how to ship food into 19 countries. The trigger was logistics not print, box building or price. It’s the same for retail POP kits. Print isn’t what concerns clients.

Talk to your clients. Get them to tell you about their world. Listen for the triggers. Solve those and the print will take care of itself. Your problem solving is more important than your presses.

The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with Printing Impressions. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of Printing Impressions.