Ian Swarbrick of XL Group, whose training division works with Xerox to train customers in how to sell digital print, believes that the key difference between digital and offset print is the fact that the latter is a commodity while the former is a solution. “That basic difference fundamentally alters everything, from the sales technique and administration procedures, right through to the business model of the company that produces it,” he says. “Sales is only one aspect – but it’s an essential aspect to grasp if you’re to get the most profit from your investment.”

Out in the market, plenty of printers agree with Swarbrick’s view of the difference between offset and digital sales. Richard Knowles, joint managing director of general commercial B2 and digital outfit Buckingham Colour Quest, says digital is a “completely diametrically opposed model – printers who want to turn digital must grasp the basic truth that if we’re not to turn digital into a commodity like litho, we have to sell the value of the solution, not the cost per copy. And that takes particular skills.”

Knowles has made two trips to the US as part of the GlobalWatch Mission project to learn from other countries’ print industries. Comparing the US digital print sector to its counterpart in the UK, he says, is illuminating in many ways – and particularly on the score of salespeople and their skills.

“The divergence between the two sales propositions can be hard for existing staff to get their heads round,” he says. “Often they end up continuing to sell offset while new staff are recruited to sell digital.” In the US, Knowles says, there is a 50-50 split between companies who recruit new staff purely for digital sales, and those companies who retrain existing staff and have them sell both.

Swarbrick agrees that here in the UK, it’s a bit of both. “It’s quite hard to teach old dogs new tricks if they’ve been used to selling on the commodity model, but there are salespeople out there who can see the way the wind’s blowing and are wanting to learn.”

Scotch Kirkpatrick, managing director of Rugby security digital printer Datagraphic, feels that digital sales reps must be first and foremost technologically skilled. “They need to understand database and IT skills for a start, and they must know the limitations and possibilities of the digital presses and their variable-data capabilities.”

Along with all this knowledge, Kirkpatrick says, the digital sales rep must have good personal qualities, including “a good listening ear to understand the customer’s overall business objectives. And a good imagination so they can come up with innovative ways of matching the press’s capabilities to the customer’s business goals. And on top of all that they need to have excellent personal presentation skills so they inspire confidence and can talk inspiringly not just to the print buyer but to the finance director, the commercial director and the chief executive, on a partner level.”

Where to find these paragons of excellence? They are in short supply in the UK, but “that’s just a question of time – when sales reps cotton onto the fact that digital is a lucrative area for them, they’ll be queuing up to learn how to sell it,” in the opinion of Swarbrick.

In the meantime, Knowles reckons that graduate recruitment fairs are a good place to start. “In the US, all digital sales people have at least an undergraduate degree. They don’t do what we do, which is to promote the machine minder to sales guy.” On the most recent GlobalWatch trip to the US, Knowles and his fellow team members were introduced to ‘Stacey the Super-Rep’ – a formidable Californian saleswoman who was paid a basic salary of £100,000 ($200,000pa) “to be a company in her own right. She employed her own salespeople and paid them a high commission, something like 6% of the gross sale, plus a high basic and, as a result, they were all very highly motivated. They had a rule,” Knowles recalls, “that if you sold a job that didn’t have any value added to it, you were sacked.”

The ability to sell ‘up past the print buyer’ is perhaps the single defining attribute of a good digital sales rep, says Knowles. “We’re talking about a ‘solution sale’ here, not the sale of ink on paper. And it’s often not the print buyer who can appreciate the solution sale – and certainly not the value of the job.”

XL’s Swarbrick adds that print buyers can sometimes be just as wedded to the commodity model as salespeople. “Some sales reps’ idea of a deal-closer is ‘we can do it 10p cheaper than the competition’. But that’s because they’ve spent years dealing with print buyers for whom that particular offer will, indeed, close the deal.” He says that there’s an equal need for buyers to get clued-up about digital print: XL Recruitment is about to launch a series of training courses for sales reps and print buyers to introduce the basics and some of the possibilities offered by variable-data digital presses.

Neither have the digital press suppliers been slow off the mark when it comes to how to sell digital print. Xerox’s ProfitAccelerator, Indigo’s Digital Selling Skills and Canon’s Business Builder are just three examples of packages offered to printers when they purchase a digital press. “Adapting to selling digital print can be a difficult transition for some companies,” says Nikki Peacock, HP’s marketing manager for Indigo. “These courses provide guidance and support in developing selling plans and marketing strategies to maximise press productivity.” Hull-based Springfield Solutions, one of the graduates of HP’s course, reckons it’s a “fantastic tool,” according to managing director Ian Lemon. “It enables you to re-tune your business development activity to ensure maximum return.”

Strategic savvy
Swarbrick makes the point that digital sales staff engaged in strategic-level solutions sales tend to consider themselves less as salespeople than as consultants able to take the role of business partner. “By far the most successful companies I know of have dedicated digital sales people who all interact with clients on a strategic level. They are enthusiastic ambas­sadors for their digital print facilities. That’s an incredibly satisfying job, and it gives you very happy salespeople.”

Commission is another thorny aspect of the digital sales model. Because individual invoice value is often less for digital than in offset, commission structures paid on a percentage of invoice value can mean staff lose out. Resolving this issue, Swarbrick believes, happens naturally when the question of invoice value is resolved. “Once you get into variable data and personalisation, you’re able to look at charging for the value of the job to the client, rather than the old formula of raw materials plus labour plus overheads etc. Digital print is more than the sum of its parts, unlike offset.”

Digital printers are beginning to consider different ways of assessing invoice value. On the GlobalWatch mission, Richard Knowles says, the team heard from a US digital printer “who produced 20,000 mailers and didn’t invoice at all for the printing of the job, but instead charged a percentage of the sales income generated for the customer from that mailer”. Printers who want to pursue different invoicing methods, he cautions, may need to abandon the security of having a guaranteed payment method in favour of ‘an everyday educated gamble’ that might pay off in spades.