InRegisterInPrint

Feb 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Katherine O'Brien

My greatest day in print sales

As a kid, one of my favorite books was John P. Carmichael's “My Greatest Day In Baseball.” It was first published in 1945 and featured “as told to” recollections from Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Dizzy Dean, Leroy “Satchel” Paige, Casey Stengel, Leo “The Lip” Durocher, Honus Wagner, Johnny Evers, Lefty Gomez, Tris Speaker, Cy Young, Pepper Martin, Enos Slaughter, Connie Mack, Walter Johnson, Rogers Hornsby and some other guys.

I always wondered if the book's format could be extended beyond baseball. For example, what about “My Greatest Day in Print Sales?” So I challenged our InRegister readers: Did they have any Grover Cleveland Alexander-like days? They might never have saved the 1926 world championship for the St. Louis Cardinals, but perhaps they saved the day (or fiscal year) for their company. Here are their stories.

An extra-base hit

Several years ago, Paul Carney, sales manager for Dual Graphics (Brea, CA), sold a 200,000 run of a 32-page product brochure. “All the products were for the hearing-impaired market,” recalls Carney. “The front cover featured a new toll-free telephone number. Out of habit, I dialed the number and discovered there was a live person answering the phone. But hearing-impaired customers [needed a] Text Telephone (TTY).”

Fortunately, Carney caught the error while the brochure was still at the mailing house. “After my customer almost choked, I suggested a simple day-glow label be placed on the cover over the wrong phone number,” says Carney. “It added about $400 to the cost of the total job and delivered better than expected results. Future orders had a similar label attached as it drew attention to the TTY service.”

Shoeless Dave learns the Chicago way

Dave Haradon, IPA (Edina, MN) team manager, describes a lesson learned on his first sales job. “My story takes place in the mid1970s,” he says. “As a new salesman in the world of graphic arts, I was pretty [naïve]. Nevertheless, there I was, selling products to trade shops and printers in Chicago.”

At the time, explains Haradon, film processors were a hot product, but nonetheless a challenging sale. “One of my very first potential customers politely listened to my sales pitch as I elaborately droned on about the features and benefits of the latest processors. At the conclusion of my oratory, my ‘financial buyer’ (as described in my Sales 101 course) looked me straight in the eye and said: ‘That was an excellent presentation, but my wife wants a meat cutter.’”

Haradon was dumbfounded. What was the connection between a meat cutter and a film processor? “After the financial buyer repeated this bizarre request, I thanked him and departed, still baffled by this strange behavior,” says Haradon. “The meat slicer was, of course, a bribe. My sales manager, who had been around the block a few times, looked at me blankly and said, ‘Well what's the problem? Go get the order.’”

Haradon went to a department store, bought a $50 meat cutter and subsequently won an order for a film processor that cost several thousand dollars.

“But selling on mere price (or bribes) alone was not enough,” he says. “I quickly learned that the ‘price’ to get the additional consumables business was going to be even more bribes and that this sales method has a short lifespan. It's as true today as it was back then: …The best way to secure an order is to sell on the value and improved profits that supplier's product can deliver, and not get caught up in the meat cutter mentality of selling on price alone.”

Wednesday is InRegister^™ day

AMERICAN PRINTER's InRegister^™ newsletter is published on alternating Wednesdays. For a free subscription, see www.americanprinter.com. Want to comment on something in this issue? Drop us a line at katherine.obrien@penton.com. We look forward to hearing from you!