Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/759357
8 The PCB Magazine • December 2016 When I was in technical marketing and visited customers with sales guys, I studied the various techniques they used. Some were very good at selling their process, regard- less of which of the chemicals companies they worked for. One sales fellow in particular was very much in his customer's corner, to the ex- tent that they provided a desk for him at their plant. Another was so in tune that he went to his biggest customer ever y day to do the morning electroless copper analysis (I presume to make sure that it was cor - rect). Maybe that was excessive, but it probably headed off a lot of potential problems, too. For the most part, all were enthusiastic about the products they were selling and convinced they had the best stuff on the market. In the meantime, I thought, sales is not for me. I much preferred coming in and making presentations without the day-to-day responsibility for making numbers. I thought of cold calling and in fact almost any type of calling on customers as a bit frightening. It took a long time before I realized that I was sell - ing and in fact we all are selling our companies' products in one way or another. For me it was making presentations, writing articles and help- ing the sales guys in whatever way possible. Still selling for the company, right? Writing a cover letter for a quotation, answering questions, expe- diting this or that, attending a meeting to repre- sent our interests—all forms of selling. Even the newsletter I instituted to keep the sales guys up to speed and on target for a fast-moving product counted as sales. When working in a PCB shop, even without any actual customer contact, if you "touch" your customer's product in any way, you are selling—by the quality job you do, by the speed with which you do it, and half a dozen other things that you will learn by reading The PCB Magazine this month. As you have probably noticed, we have quite a few regular columnists and authors these days— and this was yet another issue that just about everyone wanted to chime in on. So let's get on with it and tell you what we have inside here. We open this issue with results of our monthly survey on the topic at hand, as presented by the I-Connect007 Research Team. We received some interesting results, plus a few thought-provoking ideas that we definitely want to share with you. Next, we have All Flex's Dave Becker with a great column on…duh…sales. Dave describes the "customer acquisition of finding and selecting new customers," followed by "execution," mean - ing the successful building and delivering of the product. He echoes my sentiment that "everyone is a salesman." We asked our resident sales and marketing guru, Dan Beaulieu, to write a column for this issue. He chose to present his five favorite books on sales. Read the reviews of his five books and I guarantee you will be looking them up a mo- ment later. As Dan says in his opening paragraph, these five books "can directly influence the way by Patty Goldman I-CONNECT007 We're All in Sales PATTY'S PERSPECTIVE