Business of Print

Business people who sell print

How would you gauge your contribution to your clients’ success through the products and services you and your company provide? If you provide data driven campaigns that include response data and analytics you have access to some hard numbers. What if you provide print and print related services that don’t include any data, how do you know the impact you make vs. your competition? How do you know what to do more of and what to do less of? Maybe it’s time that you ask your clients for some tangible feedback. What you’re looking for is what where they able to do with your company that they couldn’t have achieved as easily using someone else? Go ahead, ask them. Be aware though as you’ll get some responses that may not be that flattering but I’m sure that there will be some that are real home runs.

Your goal is to determine the contribution you make to your clients’ success, get them to acknowledge it (until they do it really doesn’t matter), document the steps you took to deliver that value and look for other opportunities and clients to repeat the process. With your “business person” hat on you’ll be searching for companies that you can make a difference with. These searches seldom have anything to do with the product you deliver by itself and more often are connected to the situation the client might be in, your ability to recognize it and deliver the product and services that are again connected to their recognized issues. Always try to connect those dots.

There are plenty of printing reps selling printing. There aren’t that many business people who happen to sell print. There is a difference and that difference can impact margins, revenue, access to influencers and where you sit at the table.

It's All About the Data

The president of a company that I work with mentioned the other day that it’s “all about the data.” Their company is making great strides in moving into the marketing services space and he is leading the charge with his outside salespeople. While he maintains client accounts of his own as well as doing his “president stuff” he travels with his salespeople and leads the strategic client meetings. Over time he tries to earn the right to influence or control the output and distribution of the data. He feels that once he’s in that position he can help provide the services needed to create the end product, from design and copy to an e-mail blast, the digital or offset printing, mailing, fulfillment, or dashboard analytics. This strategy is helping him move away from some of the commodity type work they had.

While they have many of the in-house capabilities necessary to execute these projects they still look to some of their strategic alliances for help. They’ve formed these joint efforts to help them provide marketing services to their clients with the ultimate goal of doing it all themselves. Sounds like they’re on the right track.