Hi.  I’m Jessica Eng, Vice President of Marketing for Allegra Network.  And at Allegra we’re really excited about the opportunities that exist for print services providers today.  We feel that the marketing services initiative is so important for our growth, and we want to make sure that our franchise members can be true business consultants for their clients.  It’s not just about the channel, whether it’s print or digital or email or mobile, it’s about figuring out what the client’s needs are.  What are their business objectives?  What are the objectives that marketing communications can help them get?  And so by doing that and being that consultant, our franchise members can really maximize the opportunities and get additional revenue and help their clients grow.

So we’re really encouraging them to take training.  We put on workshops that are hands-on, teaching them how to be that business consultant on the front end of a project, and we’re seeing huge results.  We have franchise members really out there selling $30-$50,000 projects, and they’re getting excited about it now.  So, as you know, once there’s a few wins out there and a few successes, the other members jump on board.  And so we’re really excited about the opportunity to help our clients and to grow the network.

So one of the major support tools that we have in place at Allegra Network is what we call our Marketing Resource Center.  And so this allows our franchise members to go out and sell something and then call us.  So we all know that they’re not experts at this yet.  We’re getting there but they’re not experts in all of these various areas.  So we train them.  We give them the confidence to go out and talk to their clients about putting together a marketing plan, coming up with strategies, building a website, optimizing a website, creating a mobile landing page.  And then once they get back to their center all they have to do is pick up the phone and call us.  

So through our internal resources of the Marketing Resource Center, we can provide them with everything they need to successfully go out and sell marketing services.  So whether they need copyrighting, graphic design, website development or optimization, we have the internal resources to complete those projects.  We’ll even have a phone call or a webinar with a client, so that really enables our franchise members to be confident and go selling anything that they come across.  So our motto is just go say yes, say that you can do it, and then come back to us and we can make it happen.