The traditional method of growing your print business has been to hire more, better sales people and maybe get rid of the ones that aren’t selling anything. For decades, this has been the go-to strategy for most print businesses. Because sales resources are supposed to be paid on commission and should be “paying for themselves,” we don’t analyze that area of the business enough. We don’t fully calculate the true costs of on-ramping a new sales representative or having to let a sales representative go a couple months after they were brought on because they didn’t work out. Adding people is costly. Getting the right people is hard. Keeping really good people is a challenge. All printers will complain about the effectiveness of their sales team or will say there are some sacred cows in the group who just deliver no matter what while others continue to miss their quota quarter after quarter with solid excuses to back up their lack of performance. 

I bring this point up because the other discussion I get into with print businesses almost every day is how much it costs to drive traffic to an online print ordering site (B2C or business-to-strangers). Everyone knows about Vistaprint’s success. Others have seen smaller niche online sites do very well, but when I tell traditional B2B print businesses that some of those sites are spending upwards of $1,000 a day in Google Adword advertising in order to drive traffic, they balk at that number. I like to compare that number to the investment traditional B2B print businesses have spent on sales people over the years. For a pure online business, marketing is their sales team. Marketing is driving traffic to their site and their site is set up to convert those marketing leads into customers by ushering them through the buying process—all without parental supervision. Marketing is sales. You don’t compare your Google Adword budget to your marketing budget, you compare it to your sales team budget!

The mistake we often make, especially if you’re over 50 years old, is to continue to think about marketing as your brand. Modern marketing isn’t about your logo or your colors or the look and feel of your website. Marketing has turned into a data science that can be precisely tracked. Have you heard this saying?