No doubt you’ve heard this quote; “Change is the only constant in life,” which is attributed to Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who died in 475 BC. For sure a timeless quote; I don’t think anyone would argue that 2020 has managed to present us with a whole host of new changes! When you’re trying to make a change, the other thing that seems ever constant is “resistance to change.” Change is coming at us in 2020 in the form of a global pandemic, accelerated use of online tools, and the virtualization of nearly everything (including the sales process). Change has to be driven inside our print businesses in order to respond to the change happening in our marketplace.

As an industry, we’ve been talking about online ordering for decades. Yet, this article still needs to be written and the title is what I’m still hearing directly from printers. It isn’t a difference of opinion. Most printers understand that online tools are important. The challenge here is the same challenge faced when implementing new technology inside your business. You have to deal with the humans in order to drive adoption and overcome resistance to change. All humans resist change—both the humans inside your organization and the humans you really work for (your customers).

Humans have a wide spectrum when it comes to their reaction in the face of change. There are early adopters, those people that love new things and often jump ahead of the group. Then there are laggards, those people who always have to be dragged along. Most of us fundamentally understand this reality with our employees inside our companies. What we fail to appreciate is that our customers are humans with resistance to change as well. Our failure to appreciate this about our customers costs us in the form of wasted investment in online tools, wasted labor in failed implementations, and wasting our customer’s time. It is further complicated by another quote: “The customer is always right,” attributed to Harry Gordon Selfridge, John Wanamaker, and Marshall Field (successful retailers) who championed the idea that keeping the customer happy would be good for business.