The time is ripe for digital print. The mega-popularity of cell phones, microwaves and text messaging proves society’s ever-increasing demand for speed and convenience, while the rise of spam filters and commercial-free on-demand TV shows that people only want to receive individualized messages relevant to them personally. According to consultant Rick Littrell, these societal trends spell expansion for such “addressable” media as personalized direct mail.
“The answer is the skill sets that printers must have. Everybody’s talking volumes about digital presses and equipment, but to really take advantage of these products you need expertise in two things: one is marketing and solution selling, and two is information technology.”
Myrna Penny, PrintLink’s managing director agrees. “Technology has matured, offering communications and business-building solutions like never before. But it must be driven by people – people who will define and articulate the benefits, people who will keep the data-driven resources in top producing form as well as provide robust and unique solutions.”
Marketing and solution selling
In marketing, printers require both internal expertise and new strategies for growth, but both are typically lacking, says Littrell. He suggests one reason is that printers are unwilling to make the necessary investment: “Marketing requires effort and dollars. If a company doesn’t budget dollars for marketing, it’s not going to do it, yet very few have a marketing budget.”
He encourages printers to invest their budgets in people with marketing experience. “In Toronto I just saw a classic case where an executive assistant was recruited to do marketing just because she had helped put together the company’s brochure. Yet nothing in her history said she could do the kind of tactical analysis required for an effective marketing strategy” – defining the company’s market segment, for example, or evaluating a direct mailer’s return on investment by tracking the revenue it generates.”
“Monitoring and evaluation are essential to discover whether a sales force or a marketing project is worthwhile,” says Littrell. “We have to continually improve our personnel and activities.” Additionally, he recommends hiring marketers with a sound understanding of personalization and how to find, manipulate and enrich customer and prospect databases. His own business, MagiComm, LLC, is a marketing solutions company using multi-channel personalized communication. Finally, he says, both owners and marketing staff need to understand the importance of solution selling:
“You need to market solutions, not your production tools. Solution selling means becoming a strategic partner with your clients – not focusing on how many sheets can I sell, but rather what I can provide that will grow their business. It means asking different, strategic questions that printers typically don’t ask. Not “Do you need any four-colour today?” but “How do I help grow your business or reduce your pain points in getting your marketing message across?”
Littrell says people with experience selling software solutions know this approach because they understand the impact of something like software on the total corporation. “It’s a complex sell. When all is said and done, only about 20% to 40% of salespeople out there can make the transition to solution selling if they want to – and if they work with companies that have the vision and drive to turn them in new directions.”
IT Expertise
“IT is the craft of today in our industry,” he says, “so you need IT personnel with expertise not only in marketing data applications but also Web-enabled workflows. You need to empower your internal people and your customers at their desktops at THEIR convenience. Networks and servers are also mission critical because they keep our systems running. And on-line proofing is another necessity driven by time, convenience and economics. Yet most print shops are home-bred and are woefully lacking in the skill sets they need to maintain their IT strategies,” says Littrell.
“We have become a complex industry. It used to be that graphic artists knew enough about computer technology to keep a printing business running. But we’ve gone way beyond that now to open workflows where anything can plug into anything. That takes complexity to a whole new level. It’s not how good your ink on paper looks, but the ability to optimize internal workflows, set up hot folders, build scripts and JDFs that will separate the winners and losers.
“You need someone formally educated in computer science and networking, yet most printers don’t have those people. They don’t have to know colour; they need to know things like how to optimize a server, keep all the IT functions lined up and perform auto backup.
“If you think that’s not important, try taking out all your computers and running your business. And if it IS that important, why don’t you have somebody dedicated to it with a formal training pedigree? It makes your battle more manageable.”
Myrna adds: “It is now time for printers to take the driver’s seat and bring people to the technology – not wait for customers to ask for the service. Once there, printers need to deliver the compelling message and prove the value. This focus also requires a management outlook to fuel the initiative – and that is people-driven as well.”