Editor's Note: Dave Fellman is a long-time friend of IRgA and a veteran print salesperson and sales trainer. He has written scores of articles for IRgA Today over the years, but it's been a while since the last one. So we welcome him back with today's contribution.
By Dave Fellman
We’re about halfway through the 2026 major league baseball season. I’m a Red Sox fan. I’m not happy. Hopefully, you feel better about your team than I do about mine. If so – or if not, or if you don’t even follow the game – I have some baseball-themed sales advice for you today: Don’t swing at bad pitches!
Now that might be confusing at first glance, because salespeople are usually perceived to be on the throwing end of pitches, right? But that’s really not the kind of salesperson I want you to be, or to employ. The opposite of “making a pitch” could be described as consultative selling—asking good questions, determining wants and needs, and eventually presenting a proposal, not a sales pitch. Another way to describe that would be professional selling.
I think it’s helpful, too, to think of your sales persona more as batter than pitcher. Here’s what that means. The pitch, in my analogy, is the business you have the opportunity to compete for. That might be an individual order, or it might be a larger share of someone’s printing/graphics services needs. The decision to swing is the decision to compete for that business.
Sometimes, that order or that whole body of business is a bad pitch because it doesn’t fit you well, it’s out of your strike zone. Sometimes it’s a bad pitch because the customer is—or the prospect would be—a bad customer. In the first case, it’s business you’re not likely to win. In the second case, it’s business you really don’t want. Either way, it represents a bad use of your most precious selling resource—time!
I know there’s a tendency to tell people that you can print anything, and yes, your product line is theoretically infinite, consisting of anything you can print and anything you can outsource. The reality, though, is that you can’t be competitive across an infinite product line. That may mean price-competitive, if you’re up against a supplier who can produce something internally that you’d have to outsource. That may mean knowledge-competitive, if you’re up against a supplier who simply knows more about a particular product or service or capability than you do.
There’s a real danger of pricing yourself out of the competition if you stray too far from your strike zone, and I’m not just talking about not winning that particular order. I’ve seen too many situations where a salesperson blows it on the first quoting opportunity, choosing to compete for something that’s well outside of the strike zone, and coming in with a price that’s significantly higher than the competitor who was well-equipped for the job. The buyer thinks: “Wow, this company is way out of line with their prices. I’m not going to waste my time on them anymore.” There’s also a real danger of losing trust if the buyer suspects that you don’t really know what you’re talking about.
As for the other situation, competing for business from bad customers, let me start with my definition of a bad customer—they’re more trouble than they’re worth! Now this: Let’s let the bad customers weaken our competitors!
Please think about that. The more time and other resources your competitors have to spend talking care of the crazy people, the less time and other resources they’ll have available to go after your good customers. Also, the less time and other resources they’ll have available to take care of their good customers, which increases the likelihood that their quality and/or service failures will put those customers in play for you. But what if you’re the one spending too much time taking care of crazy people? It’ll be hard to grow, and maybe even hard to keep the customers you’ve already got.
So step up to the plate. But don’t swing at bad pitches. I’m pretty sure you’ll finish the season with a higher batting average if you approach the game that way!
Dave 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 Dave by phone at 919-363-4068 or by e-mail at dmf@davefellman.com. Visit his website at www.davefellman.com.