I’ve written a lot about our collective human habit of doing things the way we’ve always done them without stepping back to assess whether our current approach is still optimal for the times we’re living in. Sales is my target topic today. Selling the way we’ve always been selling. You hire a person with great hope for their potential. You invest a lot upfront in the form of an employee with benefits, ramp up time, and the real possibility that they might never sell anything. Sales is a skill set that virtually all companies need so you’re up against stiff competition to secure and keep talented sales resources.

With this sales model, your options for scaling are simple: hire more salespeople. Most print businesses are comfortable with this model. The investment in print salespeople has been normalized. We are used to the inefficiencies of this model. Have you ever counted how many salespeople didn’t work out in your business? Don’t calculate what this cost you, it’s depressing.

Direct sales are a channel that isn’t going away completely but my point with this article is that it is time to diversify your sales channels. By diversify, I basically mean get more than one way to drive sales into your business. It’s like a business realizing that they have three customers that represent >80% of their business. It’s risky. I think in 2022, it’s becoming risky to have only one sales channel. You don’t want to have to pivot/diversify under duress. You want to diversify when your current sales model is working and producing the cashflow you need to create and grow a secondary sales channel.