中文Most printing companies obsess over winning new accounts while quietly ignoring a far more accessible source of growth: the customers who used to buy from them but no longer do. The data is often sitting untouched in the CRM, buried under more flattering year-to-date new-business figures. Yet as veteran print business development educator Sid Chadwick argues, the strongest revenue rebound available to many shops is not a fresh conquest — it is a reconnection.
The Comfort of New Customer Numbers
Senior management teams like to review new customers and their sales for the last 12 months. The process usually produces positive numbers, and it lets leadership feel good. Budgets get built around those expected additions. What seldom happens, however, is a similarly rigorous “grilling review” of every customer whose sales are off 20 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent or more compared with the previous year — or compared with two years earlier.
Chadwick says the question that too rarely gets asked is simple: why did they leave, and what action is being taken to correct the condition? Printing is a relationship business. When a customer stops ordering, the cause is rarely price alone. More often it is a service lapse, a personnel change, a missed deadline, or simply a failure to stay in contact. Each of those causes is addressable, but only if someone is assigned to find out.
The Inside Sales Rep Academy Proof Point
Chadwick points to multiple graduates of his Inside Sales Rep Academy who are “knocking the ball out of the park” at their companies. Several top performers had almost no prior print experience. Their year-to-date numbers, however, are shocking their organizations and rewriting what the business believes is possible.
In more than one example, a president — with visible skepticism — handed an inside rep a list of no-sale customers, some going back several years, as the only list they were allowed to call. That rep is now averaging just under $250,000 per month in sales to no-sale customers, with value-added services running above 50 percent every month. The implication is staggering: the revenue was not lost because the market disappeared. It was lost because nobody picked up the phone.
Changing Hard-Wired Thinking
One of the cultural obstacles is that many print executives remain hard-wired around equipment and technology rather than around business development. A shop can invest millions in a new press and still have no systematic process for re-engaging lapsed accounts. If a scene of $100,000 per month in sales to no-sale customers were developing in front of a leader, Chadwick asks, how long would it take to thoughtfully develop that department?
The answer, in too many companies, is far too long. Inside sales is treated as a lower-status function than outside sales, even though the economics can be superior. The cost of acquiring a reactivated customer is a fraction of the cost of acquiring a net-new one, because the relationship, the trust, and the historical understanding of the customer’s work already exist. What is missing is the disciplined follow-through.
How the Academy Works
The program runs for 15 weeks of class time and homework assignments. The structure ferrets out who is willing to work and who is not. Class sizes are deliberately modest, making it impossible for participants to hide. Anyone skipping class or failing to produce homework — which requires three to five hours of personal time per week — receives a polite note to their supervisor, usually the president. Lack of assignment completion tends to be corrected promptly.
Students participate actively throughout each 90-minute session. There is a mid-term and a final exam. Grades range from C-minus to A-plus. Chadwick makes himself available around the clock if anyone gets stuck, though he averages only one evening call every two to three weeks. The curriculum teaches how to approach previous customers, how to get return phone calls from accounts that have been silent for years, and what to say when that return call finally happens.
A Practical Workforce Strategy
Chadwick’s most pointed recommendation is also a workforce strategy. If you pay your inside rep a comparable rate to your outside reps, he says, there will be no shortage of very smart, motivated single mothers wanting to fill the position after attending the academy. Even with no prior print experience, the training gives them the confidence to know what to do and what to say.
For an industry that perennially complains about a skills shortage and an aging workforce, this is not a side note. It is a blueprint. The talent exists. The accounts exist. The missing ingredient is organizational commitment to the unglamorous work of calling people who once trusted you with their work and asking, honestly, what changed.
Source: americanprinter.com — “How Many of Your Customers – Have Not Bought From You This Year…?” by Sid Chadwick
