Bill Farquharson has spent 35 years coaching print salespeople, and the shift he talks about most is in the buyer’s chair. Today’s B2B print buyers can move from thinking “I want to buy X” to holding the item in their hand in a matter of hours, and they expect the same speed from a paperboard run or a direct mail campaign. The change, Farquharson says, has been driven by a single force: the Amazon world. “Clients look at LinkedIn profiles and websites to determine if they are going to reply to a rep’s attempts to make contact,” he says. “They want to see five stars. They are doing their homework in the same way they would if they were buying a new refrigerator.”
Three sales veterans, including Farquharson, founder of The Sales Vault, say the print service providers adapting fastest are treating technology and human connection as a single system rather than competing priorities. Their playbook uses web-to-print portals, real-time data, and AI research to handle the behind-the-scenes work, then puts the actual conversation in the hands of a person who has shaken the buyer’s hand. Tech does the research, humans do the relationship.
The Amazon-Era Buyer Walks In Already Decided
Farquharson has been in the print industry for 35 years, and the most striking change of the past decade is a buyer upgrade. The new print buyer, in his telling, arrives at the first call having already read the LinkedIn profile, scoured the website, and looked for five-star reviews. The homework, he says, is the same homework a consumer does before clicking “buy now” on Amazon.
That homework, on the buyer’s side, is now table stakes. Print service providers (PSPs) that cannot be found, evaluated, and qualified by a buyer in 20 minutes online are losing deals before the first call. The rep who does reach the buyer is no longer selling a capability, because the buyer has already cross-checked that capability against the competition. The rep is selling fit, which is a different and harder job. Farquharson calls the shift a rewrite of the buying script.
The shift lands harder on smaller PSPs that lack the brand recognition of a national printer. It also lands harder on senior reps who built their books on golf outings and holiday gifts, a playbook that worked when buyers were less informed. The new buyer does the same kind of pre-call homework the old playbook was never designed to survive.
What Customers Now Expect From the Order Itself
Once a print sale is made, the customer’s expectations keep climbing. Dana Catanese, director of enterprise growth at West Chester, Pennsylvania-based Anro, has watched the post-sale bar rise faster than the pre-sale bar. Her buyers, she says, now expect the same frictionless experience they get from consumer e-commerce, even when the order is a substantial direct mail run with a tight deadline. That experience has four specific asks, and they are the asks Anro builds its Web-to-print portals around.
- Automated ordering, with no back-and-forth email chains
- On-demand printing, with no minimum runs the buyer did not ask for
- Fast turns, with delivery dates that do not slip
- Real-time tracking, with status the buyer can check without calling the rep
The four items come straight from Catanese’s own framing: “They want things automated, they want on-demand printing, they want fast turns, they want real-time tracking.” Meeting them has pushed Anro to build API integrations that trigger mailings the moment a customer’s system sends a signal, and to layer real-time data tracking on top of the workflow. For a PSP still running on email and PDFs, the workflow still looks like 2010, and the buyer is the one who notices first.
The Data Layer Behind the Pitch
Emily Yepes, vice president of Sandler, says the most underrated asset a print sales rep can build is not a contact list but a data habit. Sandler, whose seven-step consultative selling system has trained sales professionals for more than 50 years, teaches reps to look at every account’s order history on a regular cadence, quarterly or biannually at minimum. The data, in her telling, is where the next conversation starts, not where the last one ended. A rep who only logs back in to take an order is leaving money on the table. A rep who logs in to read the data, she says, is the rep who ends up in the buyer’s calendar a year later.
Yepes gives a concrete example from paperboard packaging. A buyer with five different SKUs, she says, often runs on a seasonal pattern that the buyer themselves has not noticed. The rep who pulls the data can spot the swing and call it out, asking questions that lead the buyer to rethink their reorder schedule. That rep is no longer a vendor but a partner with a view of the buyer’s business the buyer lacks. The buyer’s reaction, in Yepes’s experience, is the moment a rep is elevated from a service provider to a partner.
AI Behind the Scenes
AI is the elephant in the room for any PSP sales floor, and the three experts in this story draw the line in the same place. The technology has a job to do, but the job ends before the call begins. Yepes uses AI to research prospects and draft pre-call plans, the unglamorous work that used to eat a rep’s afternoon. The work the technology does well, she says, is research a rep would otherwise have to do on their lunch break.
Farquharson is more pointed. He sees AI as useful for lead generation and customer research, the behind-the-scenes actions that never face the buyer. He is harsher on AI-generated copy that lands in a buyer’s inbox. A customer who receives an AI-pasted email, in Farquharson’s framing, treats it the way an old reader treated junk mail. The rep who pastes an AI draft into a buyer email is signaling that the conversation ahead will be the same. AI in the inbox is a tell that the rep is not really there.
Catanese splits the difference, and so does the Anro sales floor. AI is welcome in the research and the order pipeline, where the work is mechanical and the buyer is not watching. It is not welcome in the conversation itself, where the buyer is deciding whether the rep is a partner or a process. The technology gets the rep to the call. The relationship is the rep’s job, not the technology’s.
The Call Where Tech Has to Step Back
Once the rep is in the room, the playbook flips. Yepes, who has reviewed hundreds of sales calls, says the best reps prepare exhaustively and then let the preparation go. The questions they brought in are scaffolding, not a script, and the best moments are the ones where the buyer takes the conversation somewhere the rep did not expect. A rep who cannot flex, she says, is a rep who has over-prepared. The technology, having done its job, is something the rep leaves at the door when the buyer is on the line.
Tenacity rules. Call quality wins. Authenticity rocks. Connecting at a human level creates a bond. Bringing customers new ideas results in loyalty.
Farquharson goes further, with the brashest framing of the three. Any rep can be AI’d, automated, and given a stack of tools, he says, and he will still outsell them with a library, a car, and a phone. The claim is a sales pitch of its own, but it captures a position the three experts share. The call is the last place the technology belongs. A rep who treats the call as a chance to demonstrate human judgment is the one the buyer remembers at renewal. Farquharson’s own closer on the AI question: “Augment with AI done right, and that rep will rule the world.”
Trust as the Slow Asset APIs Can’t Ship
Trust is the part of the print sale that does not move at Amazon speed, and that is exactly why it still matters. Catanese says the trust-building part of her job looks almost old-fashioned: a handshake, a lunch, a walk through the shop floor to show the press.
For a PSP selling into regulated industries, the trust conversation has a second layer. Anro’s sales team, Catanese says, leads with the company’s HIPAA compliance and SOC 2 Type 2 certification, two markers that say the PSP can be trusted with sensitive data, not just with a print job. For healthcare, financial services, and insurance buyers, those certifications are table stakes. They are also the kind of thing a five-star review does not cover on its own.
The compliance work is the slow asset Catanese leans on most. It is the kind of investment a competitor cannot replicate by signing up for a new CRM. PSPs that have not done that work get screened out by procurement. PSPs that have done the work can spend the meeting on the relationship. The trust asset, in Catanese’s framing, is what makes the in-person meeting worth the buyer’s calendar. The same pattern is showing up beyond the print industry, where why mid-career workers are choosing human skills over tech as the skill that compounds.
The Reps’ Views, Compared
Three voices, three slightly different views on where the line falls. The table below maps how each rep, in the same source interview, framed the role of technology and the role of the human in the print sales process.
| Speaker | Role | Where tech belongs | Where the human belongs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bill Farquharson | Founder, The Sales Vault | Lead generation, customer research, the work that happens before the buyer is in the room | The sales call itself; trust built through tenacity, authenticity, and bringing the buyer new ideas |
| Dana Catanese | Director of enterprise growth, Anro | Web-to-print portals, API integrations, real-time tracking, compliance paperwork | The handshake, the lunch, the on-site capability walk; reading the buyer in the room |
| Emily Yepes | Vice president, Sandler | Pre-call research, pre-call plans, account-level data review for trends | The live conversation; asking the follow-up question a script would have missed |
The common thread is not which tool to use, but where to stop using the tools. All three speakers see the sales call as the place where technology has to step back. All three also see the pre-call work as the place where technology has to step in. The risk a rep runs is the one Yepes saw on a call she reviewed for a Sandler client: a rep with a list of ChatGPT-generated questions, each of them good, none of them built on the buyer’s actual answer. “OK, check, next question that ChatGPT gave me,” is how she described the failure mode. The rep with the best tech stack is still the rep who can go off script and stay in the room. That is the same line Farquharson draws at the end of the source conversation: a sales rep with excellent interpersonal skills will succeed, and the one who augments that with AI done right will rule the world.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does “Amazon world” mean for print sales?
It is the term Bill Farquharson, founder of The Sales Vault, uses for the B2B buyer who now treats a print purchase the way a consumer treats an Amazon order. The buyer researches the rep on LinkedIn, scans the website for reviews, and expects fast service, real-time tracking, and self-service information at every step. Print sales reps who still pitch like the buyer is learning about them for the first time on the call are starting the conversation one step behind.
What do print buyers now expect from a print order?
According to Dana Catanese, director of enterprise growth at Anro, the four asks are automated ordering, on-demand printing, fast turns, and real-time tracking. The list mirrors what consumers get from a major e-commerce site, and it has become the baseline for PSPs selling into industries like healthcare, financial services, and insurance. PSPs that cannot deliver the four are losing the renewal, regardless of print quality.
How are print service providers using AI in sales?
All three experts in the source interview limit AI to the work that happens before the sales call. Emily Yepes, vice president of Sandler, uses AI for prospect research and pre-call plans. Farquharson endorses AI for lead generation and customer research, the behind-the-scenes actions a buyer never sees. The line all three draw is at the inbox: an AI-generated email to a buyer is, in Farquharson’s framing, indistinguishable from a piece of junk mail.
Why does data analysis matter for print sales reps?
Yepes, who trains sales teams at Sandler, argues that data turns a vendor into a partner. A rep who looks at a buyer’s order history on a quarterly or biannual cadence can spot seasonal patterns, sudden reorder swings, or an underused SKU, and bring those observations into the next call. The cadence itself, she says, is what makes the difference between a vendor who waits for an order and a partner who shows up with one.
What is the role of HIPAA and SOC 2 certification in print sales?
Catanese says Anro’s sales team leads with the company’s HIPAA compliance and SOC 2 Type 2 certification in conversations with regulated-industry buyers. For healthcare, financial services, and insurance prospects, those certifications are table stakes for handling sensitive data, and they are also the kind of trust signal a LinkedIn profile and a five-star review cannot replicate. The compliance work is the long-game asset that lets a PSP get past the buyer’s procurement team and into the relationship conversation.
How do print sales reps build trust with prospective clients?
The playbook, in the three experts’ telling, still leans on the human work the technology cannot replicate. Catanese describes her own version: a handshake, a lunch, and a walk through the shop floor to show the press. Farquharson frames the same idea more bluntly: tenacity, call quality, and authenticity, with new ideas as the loyalty hook. None of those assets show up on a portal, and that is the part of the sale that cannot be automated.
