One of my sales coaching clients competed for a very large order last month. She did not win it, and she was discouraged. ‘I put so much time into this’, she said, ‘this one job alone would have put me ahead of all of last year. Now I do not know what to do’.

‘You need to do three things’, I told her, ‘One, you need to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Two, you need to get back to prospecting, which you were not doing enough of when you were spending so much time on this project. And three, you need to understand why you did not win this order, which was always a long shot’.

Three Factors

Here is why it was a long shot. First, it was a prospect, not a customer. Second, it was outside of her company’s strike zone. And third, it was outside of her personal comfort zone. We should start with the latter two factors to make sure you understand.

This project involved multiple lots of short and medium-run quantities. All told, it was close to 120,000 8½”  x 11” page equivalents. And while any individual 4000,6000 or 8000 piece lot would have fit perfectly and competitively on the company’s small format, four-colour press, in the aggregate, it was a project that would run far more economically on a larger press. The owner of the printshop recognised that, so he had her get pricing from a number of trade printers, and eventually he decided to run the job in-house, but to price it based on a 15 per cent markup of the average of the trade printer’s pricing.

“I know I would not make money on the job,” he told me, “but it would have covered a lot of overhead.” OK, that is semi-flawed logic, but let me come back to that in a moment. Before that, we will talk about the situation being outside of the salesperson’s personal comfort zone. She is a small town girl – and I do not mean that to be demeaning, but it is an accurate description of her personality. The buyer was a group of people, spanning several departments in a Fortune 500 company. Her initial contact in this company was a marketing coordinator, another young woman she felt she bonded with pretty quickly. But the battleground of the sale escalated pretty quickly to the director and VP level, with some significant infighting going on between two of the principals. The bottom line is that this salesperson is not yet ready to compete at that level.

Not a customer

Now let us consider the other factor, the fact that this was a prospect, not a customer. It turned out that my client’s price was pretty competitive, ‘just a little bit higher’ she told me. But it was not competitive enough to overcome the lack of any value-based relationship between the seller and the buyer. To put it simply, it was a competitive offer from a relative stranger vs a competitive offer from a relative friend – a known quantity who has performed well in the past. If her price had been a little bit lower instead of a little bit higher, there might have been more of an incentive to give her a chance. But the combination of a price disadvantage and a relationship disadvantage is almost always a killer.

Losing battles, winning wars

What I have to say next might surprise you – it certainly surprised the young salesperson – but I think this whole story contains a lot of positives. There are lessons that salespeople need to learn, and this situation was chock full of them.

Lesson #1: Do not focus on one opportunity at the total expense of your pipeline.

Lesson #2: You will always have better success when you stick to your strike zone.

Lesson #2A: You will make more money when you stick to your strike zone. As noted, the owner’s logic was semi-flawed. Yes, a large job at low margins can make a large contribution to overhead, but it only contributes to profit if you’re well above breakeven. As it happened, this job would have turned a good month into a great month, but that is not automatic. Remember, it is not top-line volume that really determines your breakeven point, it is gross profit dollars.

Lesson #3 may have been the most important lesson for this particular salesperson. If you will permit me as sports analogy, she went from a club team to the AFL pretty much overnight, and she was not equipped to compete at that level. But she got a good look at what it is like up there. Now she knows how far she has to go, and she also knows that she wants to get there. I have been very impressed with her new attitude and approach to her job.

It has been said that you can win the battle but lose the war. Fortunately, the reverse is also true. The key, I think, is what you learn in battle. The ultimate winner is the one who learns the most, from every individual victory and defeat.    

Dave Fellman is the president of David Fellman & Associates, Cary, NC, a sales and marketing consulting firm serving numerous segments of the graphic arts industry. Contact Dave by phone at 800-325-9634 or by e-mail at dmf@davefellman.com. Visit his website at www.davefellman.com

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