Spread the Wealth?
Michael, I like your idea of cutting the CSRs in on the commission from sales. It would give the CSRs a vested interest in maintaining the relationship with the customers and hopefully improve responsiveness for the customers in day to day interaction. In my experience many sales people abdicate responsibility of their accounts to CSRs, and to a lesser extent Pre-press, after the initial honeymoon period of the account is over. Sales starts to take accounts for granted and orders often come in and get printed without the sales person's knowledge, yet sales still receives the commission. If the other people responsible for these accounts are incentivized the accounts will hopefully be more closely managed.
I also went too far with my description of sales as golfing and lunching in my previous post. Obviously, most printing sales is not done on the golf course, or over a 3 martini lunch; but this idea of sales is not entirely dead. Sales still take lunch meetings, or stop by a company to chat with their contact, or spend a large part of their time E-mailing, texting or making phone calls. And yes there are still perks such as tickets to games or shows given out to clients and prospects. The fact remains that none of this is what the customer is paying for. Despite the efficiency of the sales to customer relations that you claim to have achieved, none of these interactions is what the company is selling. The printer still sells printed material.
As far as the cross training of CSRs and Pre-press to handle orders generated from non traditional sales methods, it does not seem to be a "non starter" as you refer to it. This type of worker may actually be the future of many shops. As you yourself stated "My favorite example is PrintingForLess.com. They have three person CSR people, who are better than any sales person I ever met." If the work is available and steady, how is this multitasking employee not an improvement on a standard Salesman - CSR - Pre-press combination? And unless the Sales people want to adapt, they can, and in many instances will, be eliminated. If the sales leads are generated by Web advertising why employ traditional sales? Conversely, the product still has to be made in order to make money, so production will remain in the form of the aforementioned CSR/Digital Pre-press employee. Production will become increasingly automated and the loss of employees on the simple manual labor side will increase as well. It seems that the next generation of print employee will be a distillation of all of the current employee types, and it appears from the companies that have already adapted this approach, that the new employee archetype is a CSR/Digital worker not a traditional Sales worker.
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