Assessment

 

“I don’t have to sell. My customers come to me.”  That is what a customer told me once. If you have that situation all the power to you, but you are probably leaving a lot of business for others to grab.  Learn  how your existing customers choose you and then delve into how can you leverage that knowledge to grow your business.

Customer Acquisition

Customer acquisition is probably one of the most important business processes that a company can have. As part of an ongoing program of both sales development and customer satisfaction (shouldn’t they be one in the same) you can build a dynamic model for analyzing customer acquisition experience and use that to develop strategies for new customer growth and customer retention.

 

Well, we are certainly living in interesting times. Two years of a global pandemic, followed by conflict in Ukraine, have resulted in labor disruptions, a choked global supply chain, and a shifting marketplace. What’s next is anyone’s guess at this point.

Interesting times certainly bring a host of challenges, but they also bring opportunity. That’s as true for the printing industry, which was living through its own interesting times even before the pandemic, as it is for individuals and society.

In-plant printing operations are different from commercial shops in significant ways. They are, for example, expected to provide services that support the goals of their parent companies. Sometimes that means decisions regarding scheduling, production, or resource allocation are dictated by the needs, wants, demands, and whims of the parent company, regardless of any financial impact on the in-plant.

But in-plants are like commercial shops in that they are expected to run efficiently and keep costs down while handily meeting customer expectations and delivering work on time. To operate at that

A difficult, painful lesson from 2020 is that sometimes we simply have no control. But, while we can’t change the course of a pandemic, we can control how we react to it and move past it.

So, onward to the hope of 2021 and to thinking about how to position your company for the expected recovery. Projected GDP growth will reach 3.7% this year and, according to industry association Printing United Alliance, commercial printing will grow by 2.5% to 4%.