I talked to a business owner this morning who has decided to put all of his marketing budget into web advertising, SEO, banner ads and the like. In order to sell to big companies, he believes, that prospects will have to find him. He has lost faith in the ability of his sales force to find, cultivate and close new business.  

 

Let’s take this apart. He is a digital printer who can produce individually relevant print communication and add personalized landing pages to each piece. He is not a marketing strategist. His firm just executes what his clients bring to him and they sprinkle a little value on top based on what they learned over the years doing this for others.

 

They are not selling ideas, they are selling the service of executing projects dreamed up by others. The hard part of figuring out who to target, what to say, what channels to use and what the results tell you is being done by the client. 

 

He can’t figure out why his business is about 50% of what it was before. Umm… So to fix his problem he is going to help prospects find him once they have figured out exactly what to do and are just looking for someone to output their project as economically as possible. Once they have noticed a problem, pondered multiple ways to fix it, evaluated their options and decided on something and go looking around on the Internet to find the best offer to do what they want done. 

 

We didn’t talk long, but I suspect his problem lies elsewhere. I suspect that his sales reps are calling on the people who buy print, rather than the people who sell solutions. I suspect that his sales reps can’t build credibility with their customer base, and if they have fashioned themselves as trusted advisors, that advice is centered on how to execute a printed project rather than developing creative ways to solve their clients’ marketing challenges. I suspect that they don’t have a lead generation program that uncovers businesses with problems who don’t, as yet, know how to fix them. I suspect that their sales team doesn’t know what to say to gain access to the decision makers within those companies who bear the pain of these marketing challenges. I suspect that those sales reps do a lot of pitching and not a lot of business case building. I suspect that they look like a printer, and print is a commodity, even if it does sometimes have some sprinkles on top.