Sales process

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.

Marketing and Sales Must Work Together

Creating a Business Marketing Plan for Inkjet includes several steps. Success relies upon an honest evaluation of the print service provider and a detailed analysis of customers, competitors, and market trends. If inkjet is new to everyone in the organization, or an introspective examination of the current condition is difficult, then ask for opinions from outside observers and experts to help build the business plan.

In Part 1 of this post we described assessment, review, and goal-setting activities necessary to establish a baseline and the desired objectives for developing new business for an inkjet platform. Part 2 focuses on the marketing and sales strategies print service providers must consider to achieve the desired outcomes.

Marketing Strategy

Print service providers achieving the greatest return on their inkjet platform investments have approached marketing differently from their strategies for traditional offset or toner-based printing. Their focus is on using inkjet to help customers meet their marketing or customer communications objectives, rather than on the printed output itself. Creating awareness, interest, and demand for inkjet-enabled benefits is the job of the print provider’s marketing strategy.

Inkjet-specific marketing materials can point out how a service provider’s inkjet operation can:

• Improve response rates for customer marketing materials by making documents more personalized

• Use data to create relevant documents and images designed to improve customer experiences

• Embed promotional, informational, or educational content in transactional documents

• Reduce customer service calls by creating easily understood documents

• Drive targeted messaging in other channels and integrate printed materials into multi-channel campaigns

• Get documents produced sooner due to shortened proofing and preparation times