Successful Sales Reps are APTT to Succeed
By: Dave Clossey / T.J. Tedesco
For: High Volume Printing
Published: November, 2003

In today's fast-paced, high-pressure business climate, salespeople need every edge they can get their hands on. With many competitors looking to gobble up your best clients and make nice with your best prospects, you need to organize your efforts in order to be successful. Unfortunately, many salespeople have no plan for success - they're literally selling by the seat of their pants.

There is no shortage of seminars, programs and plans designed to lead salespeople to the promised land. While all have good intentions, most of them aren't worthwhile for two reasons: they're too complex to remember easily and they contain precious few actionable items. With that in mind, I'd like to highlight four selling "tools" that every good salesperson should possess: Attitude, Plan, Think and Tact. With just these four simple sales tools, you're "APTT" to win more business and lock in customers for the long haul.

Attitude
This is the first step. If you don't think you can, or you don't want to, you won't. Attitude is the foundation upon which every successful sales career is built. Attitude means taking advantage of every opportunity to get in front of clients and prospects - and knowing exactly what to do when you do. It's making that last call at 4:45 instead of skipping out early, or taking a later flight back home to give yourself time to make a few important calls.

So how good is your attitude? Here's a scenario with which I'm sure all salespeople are familiar. You have a key prospect that just always seems to be a little too busy to meet. You call to set up a lunch appointment, but they decline. You suggest that you drop by for a mid-afternoon visit, but they mumble about finishing some important projects. Many a salesperson has thrown their hands up in despair in the face of such formidable resistance.

A good attitude, on the other hand, means finding a way around such a roadblock. Why not suggest meeting that client for an early breakfast, when they actually have time to listen to you and think about your proposal? Sure, you'll have to get up a little earlier in the morning, but your willingness to be flexible with your schedule may be just the icebreaker you need.

Maintaining a good attitude can be a challenge. There are plenty of negative influences around you, hanging around the water cooler complaining about the compensation package, the sales manager, the economy or the last time the folks in the plant let them down. Ignore these negative influences, which do nothing but undermine your efforts to achieve success. Instead, focus on what you have in your favor - a great customer service team? Hard-working plant employees? - and turn it into a great selling proposition.

Plan
Attitude alone won't help you survive. You need a realistic, actionable plan to guide you to success! There are two characteristics every successful plan should have: efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency can be something as simple as how you schedule appointments and manage your sales territory. After all, you don't want to spend needless time in your car racing across town and back to see a single client. Take yourself through a territory planning exercise and determine which stops you can make along the way. Then, extend that exercise to plan how many stops you can make per week and per month.

Now that you have a plan for making sales calls, make sure you know what you're going to say when you get to each client. Remember, you're dealing with individual companies that have individual needs. It may be tempting, but trying to shoehorn everyone's work onto your bread & butter six-color machine may not be in anyone's best interest. A canned presentation filled with stock solutions will fall on deaf ears. Instead, tailor your presentations and your solutions to the needs and desires of your ever-changing audience.

Creating the plan is the easy part. The hard part is getting out there and doing it - unless your plan is simple and easy to implement. Then, the action items your plan has established become second nature. You make a habit of spending some time poking around the websites of the prospects you'll visit tomorrow to learn more about them, or wearing out the pages of your roadmap by highlighting routes that make sense.

Think
This one sounds really simple, right? Isn't it obvious that a salesperson must think when in front of customers? Of course! But are you thinking about what your customer is saying, or are you thinking about what you're trying to say? Well, which one wins work: good talking or good listening? It's good listening by a mile, every time.

One of the beautiful things about the great profession of selling is that most of the time prospects will tell you exactly what you need to do to win their business. And it's almost never low price, either (although often they'll say that it is). Meeting deadlines and maintaining personal integrity and trustworthiness are vital to a long term relationship. When you're in front of a key prospect, you shouldn't be looking for the best opportunity to tell them about your new press or CTP system. Instead, think of ways to reduce their fear of coming your way, and increase their fear of choosing a different company.

Don't worry if you don't believe you can think fast on your feet. Much of the time, you can out-think your competition, especially if you intimately know your craft and you're dealing with a prospect that would truly benefit from having a relationship with your company.

Tact
In today's graphic arts business climate, you may believe you have done everything right and yet you still did not win the bid. Sure, it can be frustrating and discouraging to come close and lose a good order, especially for something trivial. But the APTT salesperson will always keep their "Tact" tool in their hip pocket and exhibit grace under pressure. Remember that you're in business for the long haul, not the quick job. That's why it's worth it to hang in with good prospects and wait for the right opportunity to win their trust, their confidence and their work.

Many print buyers will remember sales representatives with gracious personalities and be inclined to try to get work to them in the future. When you've lost an attractive job by a hair's breadth, the goal at that point is to have that prospect think, "They treated me so well when they lost that bid. Imagine how good they'll take care of me when they win?" You can bet that the next time that prospect is in a jam, you're the first person they'll think to call.

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Believe it or not, you're probably already well on your way to being an APTT salesperson. That's because these tools are easy to implement, and may already be a part of your routine in some fashion. The goal is to make the action items outlined here second nature so that you can focus on creating long-lasting, profitable relationships from your most-coveted prospects. Get APTT and good luck!

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.