Gimbel & Associates Blog

Your Mindset and Approach

You need a strategic mindset and approach to establish

• Making customers, rather than finding This means earning more time with the customer, with an open invitation to continue a dialogue, and with a sincere commitment on the customer’s part to take action.

Though people in the printing industry are in the communication business, they aren’t always personally skilled in the art of information exchange. A brush-up on communication skills can      make a big difference in how customers and others perceive company executives and other personnel, and how effective they are in their print business jobs.

The printing business is awash in advanced technology and automation. One can walk around the trade shows to observe software and equipment everywhere that handles many of the tasks formerly dependent on experienced printing professionals. Automation enables printing companies to produce more work in less time and at lower costs. But that doesn’t eliminate the need for skilled humans to envision solutions, monitor progress, and include new technology in efficient workflows. And legacy equipment still in use at most print facilities will require educated operators.

For quite some time this industry will need talented individuals dedicated to keeping print a viable and valuable means of communicating information-and that’s a problem.

The discussion on business growth for today's commercial printers is highly focused on technology considerations around such topics as inkjet, digital, workflow, and other process and production related concerns.  In our strategic work with commercial printers of all sizes we constantly face a wall that challenges their senior management team. How to focus "On the Business" versus focusing "In the Business?"   Day to day operations absorb the greatest amount of time for senior management.  Where we are going and how important is it if not more so than what happened on the shop floor that day or what order did not get filled?

If you ask print salespeople about the most important things they should bring to a meeting with prospective clients, they might mention items such as print samples, company brochures, or sales pitch slide decks.

Gimbel & Associates interviewed print buyers about their experiences with printing company sales representatives and discovered that many print service providers were using sales approaches anchored in objects like these. Unfortunately, the things that matter the most to the print buyers were often missing from conversations with print service providers courting them for their business.

In our eBook “From the Other Side of the Desk” we provide printing company executives and their sales teams a rare look at the how customers perceive interactions with the sales people who came calling.

Every aspect of our lives is driven by data. The need to protect and secure this data is becoming increasingly critical.

Privacy is becoming a core market differentiator for companies. Businesses need to prove to their customers that they handle data securely and ensure the protection of privacy. 

What constitutes a violation of privacy? It’s not always obvious, and interpretation can vary based on the application, industry, etc. 

Print service providers don’t always mail what they produce for their clients, but when they do, they must be clear about the rules and regulations administered by the US Postal Service. Generating mailings (or even designing mailings) without considering the mailing requirements can blow the client’s budget, cause delivery delays, or depress campaign results. In severe cases the postal service might even reject the mail. Help clients get the most from their investments in printed and mailed communications and generate worry-free mail by being informed about mailing requirements.

A vertical market is a group of similar businesses that has a common set of needs for products and services.  Customers in the same vertical market have the same types of applications, and they often have the same business issues.

Getting to know a vertical market helps you sell because you:   

Customer journeys from awareness to purchase take place in a variety of communication channels. Multiple touchpoints provide opportunities to educate customers, transact business, or entice them to take the next step in the buying process. Some of those touchpoints involve print and others occur in digital environments. Familiarize yourself with your client’s customer journey maps to reveal new revenue opportunities and strengthen your client relationships.

Print service providers are not exposed to all the interactions clients have with their customers and prospects. You may be involved with only one small part of the relationship, such as direct marketing postcards or product brochures. To help your clients achieve their business objectives, you need to know more. Ask your clients to walk you through their buyer journeys to find out how the services you provide correspond with the client’s overall communication strategies.

Focus on the Customer Needs

We can often get so focused on producing the job itself, that we lose sight of WHY a customer is getting the job produced. It’s not because they don’t have enough work to do or that they have extra money to spend. It’s because the job supports a business need.  As you have your consulting conversations with the customer, talk about more than just the job. After all, the “job” is never going to shop with you again… but the customer and the company will.

There’s little doubt that printing companies are seeking opportunities to take the infrastructure, knowledge, and customer relationships they’ve cultivated over the years and apply them to new market areas. Surveys by organizations such as the Specialty Graphics and Image Association (SGIA) and Printing Industries of America (PIA) indicate such moves are key components of many print company strategic plans. A whole new industry conference, PRINTING United, has emerged to address this convergence of printing categories.

 Commercial printers are looking at packaging, sign printers are interested in textiles, and transactional printers are investigating wideformat (see the Gimbel & Associates blog Wide Format for Transactional Printers? Not as Crazy as it Sounds!).

Printers who create transactional documents rely on established workflows designed to generate millions of variable documents containing sensitive information like billing and payment amounts, purchases, insurance claim information, utility usage, or medical procedures. If that sounds like your business I can’t fault you for thinking your operation isn’t set up for low-volume wide format print applications like banners and signs.

These two print applications seem to have nothing in common. But is that really true?

Though the devices are different, printers produce wide format jobs on digital devices, just like transactional documents. Color and resolution is important in both cases, and both require strenuous quality control processes. Mistakes in each genre are expensive. In the high speed world of transactional documents, errors are