When Does Good Care Turn Into Wasted Time? Washington DC

In last month's column, I wrote that talking good care of current important customers should be a wide-format printing salesperson's top priority. As I noted, though, the word "good" is a tricky one. Where is the dividing line between good care and customer care overkill?

I think the best way to approach that question is to consider the temperature of each customer relationship. In this analogy, a temperature of 98.6 degrees represents a healthy relationship. At that temperature, the customer is telling any of your competitors who call on him that he's happy with his current printer.

I'd like to see the temperature just a little bit higher than that. We'd all be horrified if a child or grandchild had a temperature of 104 degrees, but I think that's the ideal temperature for a printer/customer relationship. The extra few degrees above 98.6 provide a cushion against any minor problem.

Many salespeople seem intent on trying to raise the temperate even higher, perhaps to 125 degrees. I'm talking about the salespeople who bring candy or donuts or bagels, who never forget a birthday or anniversary or to ask after parents or children or pets, who spend 10 minutes taking care of business on every sales call and then 20 or more minutes socializing. It seems to me that these salespeople are trying to pile like on top of the trust that represents the real basis of any successful printer/customer relationship. The question is whether that like factor really adds anything to the likelihood that the customer will continue to buy from the salesperson and the printer. The answer is probably not!

Needy Customers

Now, I do understand that there are customers whose definition of 98.6 degrees includes the donuts and all the rest, and if they're really important customers, I guess we have to accept the time and expense it takes to keep them happy. Far more often, though, printing salespeople are simply making bad prioritization and time management decisions, and spending more time and money than is necessary to keep a customer happy—at the expense of prospecting for new business!

Here's my bottom line on a wide-format printing salesperson's priorities. First should be taking good care of current important customers. A close second should be developing new important customers. A distant third should be anything else if there's any time left after taking care of the really important parts of the job.

Next Month: More about finding the "balance point" and defining "important."

David M. 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 him at 919/363-4068 or visit his website at www.davefellman.com.