Even businesses that have reached a certain size and are just looking to maintain their current position will need to keep adding new customers to compensate for natural churn in their client roster.

This is why salespeople are so important to the health of any given business and why choosing and retaining the right people should be high up on the list of priorities for any printer.

How you go about identifying and recruiting the right people will depend on the type of business you hope to be, the roles you are looking to fill, the level of experience required and what you are able to offer in return.

What is somewhat surprising is that, while there are many different types of print business, with many varying sales needs, there is an emerging pattern of the ‘right way’ to establish and maintain a successful print sales team and, as with many things in life, the starting point is culture.

“I did a lot of SME sales training and the number one reason people wanted sales guys was because they didn’t like selling themselves, they thought it was a dirty career,” says Brilliant Media strategy and marketing director Tony Kenton. “They say ‘you know what sales people are like’ and what they meant was ‘sales people lie’ or ‘it’s smoke and mirrors’ – my advice to those people would be: if you don’t believe in your own sales team then there’s no point. How can you convince your people to go out and do their jobs with hand on heart if you don’t believe it yourself? You have to believe in the same sales message that your sales team are delivering.”

Lesson two, according to Kenton, is to have a sales message in the first place. Commonly known as the ‘elevator pitch’, your sales message should explain what makes your business unique, why the client should use you and what their benefit will be and should be nothing to do with “faster, better, cheaper”.

“A lot of print companies say: we offer a wonderful service, high quality at great value for money prices,” says Kenton. “That’s not a sales message. What would they say? We do poor quality, we let people down and charge a lot? Value for money, quality and service are all things that are now standard, that’s your starting point, if you’re not going to be able to do that then you shouldn’t be out there selling anyway.”

A classic example might be an insurance salesman offering ‘financial security for you and your family for the rest of your life’ versus one saying ‘I sell insurance and it will cost you £300 a month’. Both are selling the same thing but with a completely different pitch. 

How does this apply to print? In Brilliant Media’s case it’s the different between the old “faster, better, cheaper” and a pitch that doesn’t even mention print: “If I could come to you and have a smart meeting with you on how Brilliant Media can constantly feed into your sales funnel so your sales people always have new people to see every week, would that be of interest to you? Well yes, it would.”

Strategy first

Before you get to anything as prosaic as actually recruiting salespeople, you need to have a clear idea of what your business model is and therefore what your sales strategy is going to be. For Brilliant Media, the focus is on solutions selling and the ROI for the client, but for many printers their niche may be in production efficiencies. Either way, the business model will inform the sales strategy and therefore the recruitment priorities.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a small business or a big business, you need to recruit to suit your business model,” says Pureprint chief executive Mark Handford. “Some businesses are sales driven and some are driven by efficiencies in manufacturing or being a specialist in a certain area, in which case perhaps they don’t particularly need a sales force.”

Andy Bailey, director of client strategy and insight at Inc Direct, adds: “Whether you’re a £1m or a £100m business, before you recruit sales people, you need to look at what your overall strategy is. For example, are there markets that you’re not in yet that you want to be in or, do you want more of the same?

“It’s understanding within your own business exactly where the holes are. If you’re just trying to do more of the same then you look for people to sell more of the stuff you’re already selling; but if you’ve got wider ambitions – if you’re a litho printer that wants to get into VDP for example – you clearly need to hunt down people that understand that market and won’t just sell it as print but as part of an overall solution.”

Hunters and farmers

The expression ‘hunters and farmers’ is used a lot in the world of sales, according to George Thompson, joint managing director of print recruitment specialist Harrison Scott. “The hunters are the people who just love getting the new business,” he explains. “And the farmers are those people who feel uncomfortable with rejection and much prefer to look after existing accounts that might have been won a long time ago.”

Depending on the type and size of business you are, you may have one, both or a mix of these two disciplines. “Some companies are structured in such a way that they have people concentrating on new business only and have account managers who run the existing accounts,” says Thompson. “However, this tends not to be the case in much smaller printing companies, where the salesperson has to be more of a jack of all trades.”

Pureprint’s Handford is not convinced that a genuine ‘jack of all trades’ even exists. “Most old-school salespeople think they’re good at both, but there’s a big difference between somebody who can open a door and somebody who can manage that day-to-day account – they are two different types of people,” he says.

Bailey agrees: “I think in our industry in general there is a huge divide between people who are genuinely top sales guys and people that are really account directing but have a sales hat on. If I interview someone that I feel has had slippers on for the last three years then typically they wouldn’t go any further in our business.”

Kenton, who professes himself “a useless account handler”, also believes that sales personnel and account handlers require fundamentally different skills. “A sales person is a different type of person to an account handler,” he says. “I haven’t got the temperament, the patience, or the eye for detail to be an account handler. But I am a good sales person and it’s because once I’m in and I’ve sold I want to move on to the next client.”

He adds that Brilliant Media breaks down its sales recruitment policy into door openers and account handlers and that “the two are not related at all”. 

“One lot are sales people and the others are order takers; the trouble in print is that most people think of themselves as sales people when they’re actually order takers.

“In other words they pop into their clients for a cup of tea and say, ‘what have you got on for us this week?’ That’s not a sales person, a sales person is somebody who creates sales and an order taker or account handler is somebody who deals with them once the sales person has gone.”

Kenton goes on to argue that all print businesses, regardless of how small they are, should separate new business and account management, even if that might seem an unaffordable luxury at first glance.

“I love the idea of keeping those two separate so if somebody does go off – whoever it is – the salesman hasn’t got the client in effect because they don’t know what’s happening and the account handler would crap themselves if they had to go and get new sales in,” he says.

In this scenario, it helps if you can be flexible in the package you offer. For instance a proven new business sales person may be willing to take a pay cut to move from a larger firm to a smaller one where they can have a stake in the business. In fact, this is how Bailey ended up at Inc Direct. “I think that anybody who’s looking to recruit, if they find somebody they like, they need to get to the nub of what that individual’s looking to achieve,” he says.

“For some people, it’s a high basic and lots of commission, for others it might be a stake in the business and a lower salary. Certainly for smaller businesses it helps to be able to flex in terms of what kind of offer you can put on the table, that isn’t just driven around sales and bonuses.”

New recruits

While you might assume that experience is a prerequisite when it comes to hiring sales staff – and that would be true for account handlers – but when it comes to new business, it is not necessarily the case that a successful sales person needs experience of print, or in some cases, even sales.

“You hire for attitude and you train for skills. We’re looking much more at people who understand a business model, so our sales people might just as easily be business managers who have worked in other industries,” says Kenton.

“Maybe it’s a detriment them knowing anything about print; in fact, we don’t want them knowing anything about print – that’s the last thing we bloody well want because they end up telling people what they can’t do, not what they can.

“We’re only one side of the industry and the rest of the industry is probably looking for print knowledge and how to close a commodity sale. How you close a commodity sale is, you say: I’ll do it cheaper.”

Inc Direct recently hired its first graduate recruit through specialist Pareto Law to help Bailey and CRM solutions director Roger Stevens with lead generation. “He does all of our research and potentially makes the initial call,” says Bailey. “I think there are a lot of companies like us that pay too much money just for people to pick up the phone and do new business. Good quality sales people you want in effective meetings as opposed to sitting behind a desk all day making 50-60 phone calls.”

Brilliant Media has yet to take on any graduate sales recruits, although Kenton says it’s something the firm would “absolutely look at as graduates tend to be more positive and haven’t got any preconceptions”.

He adds: “At one of the companies that I worked with in the US, we hired a guy just to be a door opener and we didn’t tell him anything other than that he needed to get in one new client a day and then he could go home. He was basically going home by about 11 o’clock everyday because nobody told him it took longer than half a day to land a sales lead.

“He didn’t have any old, bad habits and he used to land so much business. I remember one of the clients we got from him was an existing client and the account handler phoned up and said ‘I noticed you’ve invited this guy to come in and talk to you; aren’t you happy with the service?’ and the client said, ‘I’m delighted, but the guy who rang up was so enthusiastic and energetic I didn’t have the heart to say no!’”

The real deal

When it comes to recruiting a super new business sales person, there are a few things to look out for prior to and during the interview, most of which centre on whether or not the candidate you’re considering is the real deal.

If they have come through a recruitment agency, then you would hope to only be seeing genuine candidates, although it’s important to develop a partnership with your chosen recruitment firm to avoid wasting time and potentially money on candidates who turn out to be duds.

“If it’s a more senior role I always insist that the recruitment agency come and see what we do and how we do it. The good recruitment agencies are the ones that spend time getting to know your business,” says Bailey.

Handford adds: “If you’re going to take somebody on with a recruitment firm you need to do your homework – not just on the individual salesperson you’re interviewing but on the recruitment company as well and see what kind of candidates they’ve supplied in the past.

“If they haven’t got the right processes in place [to eliminate blaggers] and you end up with that person, that’s a reflection on the recruitment company, so you do need to form that relationship and then the trust comes.”

Thompson says that a good rule of thumb is to ignore anyone who just promises turnover. “I tell clients: if someone makes a concrete promise of bringing in turnover, terminate the interview right away and never hire that person. You want someone who says, ‘I can’t make any promises but here’s my track record and if I join I will do my very best to repeat my past success’. The guide to future performance is past behaviour.

“Most B1 printers would be happy with a sales executive who had a £1m per annum track record. I have been fortunate enough to place a small number of elite B1 sales people with turnover track records in excess of £3m per annum. Not one of these sales people made any promises at all however they all delivered with the new companies I put them into.”

The other key to success is time, according to Pureprint’s Handford. “What you’ve got to be prepared for, when you take somebody on, is that it will take a little time for new people to hit their stride,” he says. “It is important – you hear of companies that just give people three months, and if they haven’t moved stuff there’s a predicament there. But for us, it’s all about giving that person the support and the time.”

Bailey agrees: “I think in truth a lot of the quality sales guys they take a little while to deliver but when they do deliver they deliver very secure business as opposed to quick wins.” 

TOP TIPS

Have a budget “Any business – it doesn’t matter if they’re big or small – has got to have some sort of budget for recruitment. That can be for placing ads with somebody like PrintWeek all the way through to using a specialist recruitment agency, but it’s important to have a budget,” advises Handford.

Take your time “The managers and sales directors in the printing industry who have the best track record of hiring top salespeople tend to put a great deal of time here into the interview process,” says Thompson. “Those who give the impression they are just trying to buy in an order book tend not to get the really good salespeople versus those who stress the importance of a meaningful relationship, job satisfaction and career path.”

Find the right package “For a smaller business, if you’re trying to attract a high-roller that understands how to sell value then for some of the more experienced guys it isn’t just about basic salary and pounds in the back pocket, it’s more about entitlement to shares,” says Bailey. 

Don’t hire turnover “I know a lot of small SMEs that have gone out and got sales people to try to leverage their knowledge on their client base and see what they can convert, but if you’re a B2 six- or 10-colour press house, unless the price is right why would those clients move? So it’s not really a sales pitch, it’s a commoditisation of their existing work, so they end up having less margin for their new company, which is why it tends not to work,” says Kenton.