How to Sell Print for Elections: A Beginner’s Worksheet

Printing for election campaigns is big business. Since there are several elections across Canada and the United States taking place in the upcoming months, we compiled this worksheet for you to get more customers for your print business and make more sales during election season.

This worksheet is divided into three parts:

1. Contacting your client
2. Identifying printing needs
3. Making the sale

This blog article is a general worksheet. If you’re looking for more in-depth guides, we have a 4-part series to help you, starting with finding prospects.

For now, let’s start with the basics in this article.

Tip: Copy and paste this article into a document so you can work through it —it’s interactive!

A Beginner’s Worksheet to Election Print Sales

1. Contacting Your Prospects

There are two goals in this stage to get more customers for your print business.

Goal #1: Know your prospects

Goal #2: Make yourself known

Candidates

To find candidates and their contact information, check the election webpage of your municipality, province, or state (depending on the election). Here’s an sample from the Kingston municipal election webpage:

This page gives us the following information that will be helpful when selling print:

• Candidate’s name: In addition to this, you’ll also want to find out who is the key decision-maker in buying print (as it may be somebody else helping them).
• Office they’re running for: Some offices have higher average campaign spendings, so you can likely sell more print to those candidates.
• District/ward they’re running in, if applicable: Those with a larger geography and/or voting population will generally require more print materials, and candidates may get a larger spending limit.
• Contact information: This is how you will reach the candidates, their campaign managers, or someone who can give you a lead.

Sometimes this information is not all on one page, so you’ll need to click links on the page until you find what you need.

Non-Candidates

Don’t forget to contact third-party advertisers, business, and organizations too. They may need promotional materials to support a candidate or a cause, or to make more sales during election season.

Checklist

Work through this checklist. To answer each question, you’ll need to research, plan, and be proactive.

Position your print business.

☐ What is your election-specific value proposition?

☐ What is your election-specific positioning statement?

Set a schedule.

☐ What are the important dates in the election?

☐ When will you need to contact your clients?

Identify your prospects.

☐ Who are the candidates that you can sell to?

☐ Who are the non-candidates that you can sell to?

☐ What is the best way to reach them?

Find out their needs.

☐ What are their printing needs?

☐ When do these printing needs have to be filled by?

☐ Do they already have a print provider?

☐ How will you fill their printing needs?

2. Identifying Printing Needs

Sometimes clients need more products that they think. The diagram below is an example showing the candidate’s goal (red), strategies (yellow), tasks (blue), and print product needs (green).

This diagram helps you understand not only what they need, but why they need it. It makes selling to them much easier.

You can complete this diagram for each candidate who you plan to sell print to.

Popular Election Print Products

We made a chart with some of the most popular items during election season. Try filling in the blank boxes.

3. Making the Sale

Finally, your customer comes to the point of making a decision. This moment is therefore critical—you need an effective call-to-action (CTA). Below are some common pitches that you may be using to sell your print services. Match them to the corresponding CTA.

Answers:

1) E, 2) F, 3) D, 4) A, 5) C, 6) B

Dissolving Hesitation

Finally, here are 4 steps to dissolve any final customer hesitations:

1. Find out why they’re hesitating.
2. Address that particular need.
3. Highlight why you’re the best choice to meet that need.
4. Point out the advantages of making a purchase now instead of later.

Don’t forget to use samples, upsell, and cross-sell other products!

Earning Even More

In conclusion, we hope this worksheet has helped you get started on selling more print during this election season. To end off, we wanted to give you a few final tips to make even more profit.

☐ Outsource your printing to SinaLite for lower production costs.

☐ Check out SinaLite’s selection of over 1,000 products to meet all your clients’ election print needs.

☐ Subscribe to Printer Success so that you can learn even more ways to grow your business.

Want to learn more? Check out series 4 Steps to Successful Election Print Sales for a more in-depth looking at how to make the most out of election season:

1. Finding Prospects

2. Matching Products to Needs

3. Closing the Sale

4. Nurturing Repeat Business