My customer doesn’t want to change. This is a statement I hear a lot, especially when speaking about order entry, artwork approval, and all the other interactions required with your customers to make your business work. Your customer is a required player in your business; oftentimes they are not a cooperative player, nor all that open to your suggestions. 

I think one of the most amazing parts of our industry is the fact that the customer provides a key piece of the custom manufactured product (the art file) all too often in a just-in-time fashion. Amazing and crazy-making at the same time because it also assures that the product you produce is valuable to ONLY the customer who ordered it. I know both these statements are ridiculously obvious for those of us who have spent our entire careers in the print industry. I have spent the last few months trying to help folks from outside the industry understand what makes print unique. Technology people are quick to make lots of assumptions that end up biting them in the butt. I have seen large sums of money wasted with supremely arrogant technology teams assuring printers that they can figure everything out—then they are totally stumped by the complexity of prepress, revisions, and print-ready files that are absolutely required to keep the whole business process functioning.

After we win the customer, we too often forget that we must continue to “sell the customer” on anything we want them to do when interacting with us. A salesperson would never tell a customer that they need to change. A salesperson would never tell a customer they need to be trained on a new way of doing business. Those are not “sales approved approaches.” Sales is all about framing things in terms of the benefits to the individual you want to sell. When thinking about changing your customer behavior, the very first thing you must do is think about it from their perspective—literally “what’s in it for them?” This requires you to pause and STOP thinking about what’s in it for you!