Customer events and open houses are fantastic opportunities for print service providers to demonstrate new capabilities and engage customers. No other promotional or marketing effort can match the impact of interacting with customers in-person at your facility. You’ll have the full attention of attendees and ample opportunities to show them the benefits of working with your firm.

These carefully planned events also allow you to change notions people have about your company and give you a chance to show off the investments you’ve made to handle your customers print and digital communication demands. If changing customer relationships is part of your business plan, an open house or similar affair is an ideal way to launch the effort.

A Print Buyer Perspective on Typical Sales Calls

How would you like to learn how your sales force is doing – directly from prospective customers? Wouldn’t you like to find out what is going through buyers minds as they sit through the presentations tendered by your sales force?

We all know the print marketplace is changing, so print sales people must adapt. How is that working out? Are your salespeople giving customers what they need to encourage them to do business with you? Are you failing to sign business you ought to get?

In a new eBook from Gimbel & Associates, printing companies get a rare look into the minds of customers. We asked print buyers to tell us how they perceived the print service representatives that called on them. We wanted to find out what salespeople are doing right and where they need to improve.

We recently assisted one of our customers with a major business evolution to inkjet. The company migrated from a cut sheet toner printing environment to continuous roll-fed inkjet platform. It’s a journey becoming common as clients demand the flexibility inkjet provides and printing companies scramble to respond.

• What can you do that others cannot? What case studies or testimonials can you use?
• What skills or business practices differentiate you from competitors?

Mailers are accustomed to postage rate increases in January, and the updates for 2018 followed a familiar pattern. Besides the rate increases, the US Postal Service is updating elements of the postal system. Industry analysts expect more developments soon. Mailers need to stay informed as the mailing business becomes increasingly driven by technology and data. Neglecting to keep up on postal developments can result in missed opportunities and unnecessary costs.

US law mandates the US Postal Service keep rate increases in line with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for market-dominant products like First Class letters and Marketing Mail. The law allows more pricing flexibility for parcel shipping services where the USPS competes with private carriers.

The CPI price cap keeps rate increases within a definable range, but that doesn’t mean the USPS assigns identical percentage increases across the board. Rate changes for individual classes and presort levels will vary with this latest price adjustment.

In April, 2017 the US Postal Service rolled out a new way for marketers to communicate with their audience. More than five million households subscribe to the free Informed Delivery service and the numbers are growing. With Informed Delivery, consumers receive daily emails containing scanned images of letter-size mail they will receive in their physical mailboxes later in the day.

Campaign effectiveness improves when marketers connect physical and digital channels. Informed Delivery is the easiest way yet to accomplish this feat. The program doubles consumer views of marketing material with no increase in cost or extra preparation. We’re advising print service providers to update their clients about this opportunity to increase direct mail effectiveness.

True leaders create an environment and culture where people can speak, question, and contribute. They are the people who listen to peers, partners, and subordinates without judgement; even in difficult conversations including “bad news” or critical comments. Effective leaders want others to express their honest opinions and find solutions in dialogue that support larger goals.

Printers operating without a MIS system are flying blind

It is easy to tell if a print operation is making money by looking at profit and loss reports. Not so simple is finding the information management needs to make decisions such as determining how much work they can add before purchasing new equipment or when to hire more people. And recognizing the point to adjust pricing for individual jobs or accounts is nearly impossible without a system to capture job level data and generate cost analysis reports.

In many shops, job cost data from the production floor is randomly collected and rarely reviewed. Making the task even harder, many shops use separate, unconnected processes to handle estimates, order entry, job scheduling, postage deposits, time tracking, inventory, and billing. Employees manually copy information generated by one software system into another, leading to errors and omissions. Real time data is unavailable, rendering informed daily production adjustments impossible.

In environments where managers cannot compare job-level costs to budgets or estimates, changing conditions or inefficiencies can make it possible to unknowingly lose money on jobs–and do it repetitively.

The Key to Success is in the Data

Helping non-profits reach their objectives for fundraising and retention requires print service providers to use a new approach; different from how they’ve interacted with customers for decades. Print vendors must dedicate more time to probing, analyzing, and testing than they might apply to traditional direct mail campaigns. A file of names and addresses imaged on pre-printed shells will not yield the desired results. The key to non-profit success is in the data.

 A non-profit organization’s data could be outdated or in disarray. Print service providers may have to help their non-profit clients assess, augment, and use the data necessary to make their fundraising campaigns successful. It is important to do this work before attempting to design compelling variable data campaigns.

Start with an analysis of the data that exists within the non-profit’s donor databases:

• What information have they captured?
• Did they record the information in a consistent manner?
• Is information missing from some records?
• Are there known duplicates?
• Is the data centralized or is it spread across several departments or locations?
• How old is the data?