Do you plan your future sales estimates well?

Many of the printers suffer the threat of an overly optimistic sales planning.

When planning, everyone is positive. “We know that we are going to beat last year's figures! We know we will grow our company and achieve bigger and better things." The only problem is that often they don't know exactly how they will do it...

Another problem with planning is that decline is rarely planned for. You can lose up to 14% of customers annually. Other clients will order fewer prints. Therefore, the amount of what it takes to achieve your goals may be much greater than you think. Even more so, when unexpected events arise such as COVID19 that disrupts all our planning. That means we have to find ways to get new customers and more billing from existing customers to make up for those losses.

Worse yet, many people don't know they won't achieve their goals until it's too late. Often it is only at the end of the target period that we have a real idea of whether we are on the path to success or not. And that means that it is already too late to react.

In the EVID Workshop I show you how to do a good sales planning and how to find new customers in new markets (with data that will support your decision) as well as new applications to offer your current customers.

Create the Need for Change in a Client

A purchase is a change and we all know that human beings, including your client, show resistance to change. So our objective, to “open the eyes” of the client, is to find a strong and clearly defined organizational and/or personal benefit that cannot be ignored by the client.

Customers move for two reasons, to get closer to something they like or to move away from something they dislike.

The commercial is responsible for detecting what those elements are.

And, how do we raise it so that the client listens to us?

The pitch presented to the prospect should:

• Offer the client a different way of looking at their business. This requires thinking from the customer's perspective. That means doing research on the client, their market, their objectives, their threats…. And it also means being disruptive, boosting curiosity in the sales force. Obviously we can't be experts in everything, so we have to learn to be curious about everything we don't know. There is a very good and very simple technique to search on Google (or any other search engine), which is to add the word "infographics" in the search term. That will give us very clear pictures, generally, of the most relevant data in a market.

• Secondly, our proposal must lead to a solution (not start from it). This is a very common mistake of traditional sellers. They want to sell their product so badly that they try to mold the customer to fit their product, instead of their product to fit the customer's needs and goals. Salespeople need to get to know the customer, analyze what they want, what they need, and only then offer the product from their portfolio that suits that specific customer and meets the customer's requirements.

• Lastly, the proposal to be made must be made through a bilateral conversation with the potential client about the opportunity that it will mean for the client and, as I have mentioned before, the impact of that opportunity on the client's company.