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Week by week, prodded by the individualized "action steps" they were supposed to take, salespeople like Bill Chalifoux started retraining themselves and their customers. Instead of just making a bid and hoping for the best, Chalifoux would listen to the customer describe a job. Then he would draft a letter recounting the details, "to show I listened" -- reminding them, say, of his idea to switch to a smaller box to cut down on postage -- without mentioning a price. Then he'd talk with them to make sure both parties understood each other. Then came a second letter, which included a price at the bottom. "We've earned their confidence, which is worth something," Chalifoux explains. His colleague Al Autin stopped talking about the bindery at his first meeting with a customer. "I listen, then I tell them, 'I'll go back and put together a program based on your needs," he says. No longer does he get bogged down answering the kind of routine questions that make Booklet Binding sound like every other bindery: How many pockets on your stitcher? How quick a turnaround could you give me on 10,000 16-pagers?

By October 1994, when the classes were through, most members of the sales crew were better prepared and better organized. Some were even penetrating higher levels of authority within their customers' ranks. But those kinds of conversations meant fielding harder questions about specific capabilities. "We said we were experts, but we weren't," admits Patrevito. Maybe, he thought, we could get plant workers to teach the salespeople about the bindery's different disciplines: the folding foreman could lecture on folding; the plant manager could sermonize on saddle stitching. But there seemed to be too many snags: How would they make the time to do it? What if the workers weren't good teachers?

No, it wouldn't work. Somehow, the salespeople would have to turn themselves into experts.

"I barbecued him," brags Larry Bralich, displaying a hint of sadistic pleasure. "He got on a topic I knew -- postal regulations -- and said things I knew were way wrong." Next to him, Bill Chalifoux, who has just been described in terms normally reserved for poultry, ducks none of the shame. "Other people I could fool," he says. "I couldn't fool Larry."

Chalifoux, like every other salesperson, had been assigned a topic area -- in his case, fulfillment, mailing, and personalization -- and had been given eight weeks to become an expert in it. To demonstrate his mastery, he had to deliver a two-hour presentation, complete with handouts, in front of his peers, including the company's experts. "I felt bad after I did it," says Bralich of the way he turned the heat up on his colleague. Not half as bad, probably, as Tom Ashcraft felt after his presentation on folding. When Phil Moreno had asked a question, Ashcraft snapped, "Why do you need to know that?" Later he viewed his performance on videotape while in bed, cringing. "That was all the critique I needed," he says.

In thinking about how to build expertise into his sales team, Patrevito had mumbled something that proved to be wiser than he realized: "The best way to learn is to teach somebody else." So he and Landiak drew up a list of different aspects of the "finishing" business, the industry term for the functions Booklet Binding performs: saddle stitching, perfect binding, mailing, cutting, customer service, scheduling, estimating, and so on. Landiak created a general outline for each one -- What is paper folding, and how is it done? What's the configuration of rollers on a folding machine? What type of folding do we do better than anybody? -- and Patrevito assigned the topics to individuals and groups, starting in the spring of 1994.

The salespeople's research culminated in the two-hour stint in front of their peers, including in-house experts on the topic. Karin Hoffman, one of the company's first employees, was part of a group that created a takeoff on Reader's Digest, teaching about customer service under such familiar headings as Laughter, the Best Medicine, and Points to Ponder. A group studying estimating came up with a Jeopardy-style game in which the first prize consisted of steak knives -- a detail borrowed from Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet's scathing 1984 play about real estate salesmen. "It was genius inspired by bourbon," says estimator Bob Krueger.

After hearing their presentations critiqued -- Ashcraft says he "learned to say, 'I don't know the answer, but I'll get back to you' -- the salespeople offered 90-minute versions of their seminars to the company's 45-member administrative staff. Those presentations began in late fall 1994 and ended early in 1995. "It's nice that we were able to do it in front of people we knew, but there's a downside to that," says William Mead, who left the company last May. "Your best friends can be your worst enemies."

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