Avoiding The 'Lowest Cost' Syndrome:


Taking three days for a quote may be okay for an offset job, but is unacceptable in the rapid-turnaround environment of on-demand printing. Twenty–four hours or less is the kind of response you need to give. It defines the business you are in and adds value to your services. And, services are what you are selling. If your background is primarily in the offset printing world, you were, to a certain extent, selling a commodity.

Offset printers are used to promoting long runs and inventory—they sell unit cost. With digital printing, the cost calculation must include: the cost of money, the cost of warehousing, the cost of obsolete materials and the cost of waste. The calculation should also include the loss over time of the initial capital used to produce the long run piece. Equally important, but harder to put value on, is your customer's cost of making a sale. The majority of printed material, from the brochure to the product manual deals with making a sale or making a sale stick. Variable data, customized marketing pieces, data warehousing services and just–in–time printing are key components in reducing the cost of making a sale.

On-demand printing sells on value. Quicker time to market, savings on inventory, reduced waste, updates and revisions and targeted, personalized marketing pieces. It’s the value–added that’s important, not the printed piece, itself. It’s your ability to provide a service with a cost benefit that you’re selling. This profoundly changes the relationship, because your "customer" is no longer a print buyer who thinks in pennies per page but a decision-maker who thinks in return on investment. Don’t waste your time selling to a print buyer who only wants to beat you up on price. The person who’s interested in the cost of warehousing is the CFO. Clearly, you must think outside-the–box when selling on demand services. The key word here is services, notice I did not say "selling on demand printing".

Finish The Job
Customers are buying a useful brochure, manual or marketing piece. Finishing must be an integral part of the service provided. Fortunately, major manufacturers of book finishing equipment for quick printers and small offset shops, such as C.P. Bourg, Duplo, MBM and Standard Finishing are addressing the needs of the print on demand market and making vast improvements in bindery equipment. To accommodate on demand providers, Baum, Duplo, Standard and other manufacturers have reduced setup times on their machines. Tasks such as changing sizes automatically with the push of a button or making other adjustments can now be done easily—from tabletop folders to cutters and bookletmaking machines.

Focus Your Sales Force
Without sales, there is no business. Sales are essential to any firm. At the same time, getting the sales force to learn how to sell the benefits of digital printing can be problematic. The challenge of identifying, training and retaining good salespeople is especially relevant in the field of digital printing. The technology, although not entirely new, is outside the experience of most traditional offset salespeople. Different skills and training are necessary. Most conventional printing salespeople make their money on volume and low price, in bidding wars managed by purchasing agents. An on-demand printer is selling service, an intangible. Here, volume related negotiating skills are ineffective.

Print buyers are accustomed to gauging costs and making decisions on a per page basis. In order to sell services on a different footing, you need to get to the vice president of marketing. He immediately understands the value of getting 250 copies of a new product brochure in time for a trade show, four days away. When the trade show is over, those inevitable corrections can be made, approved and sent to the offset press for the high volume run. The flexibility of digital printing can work for clients once they understand how to take advantage of technology and realize that the old cost per page metric is no longer the most efficient or cost effective way to buy and evaluate printed materials. The customer doesn’t want to know the technical details of how the work is produced, he only needs to know that his problem has been solved.

Focus your efforts on the "benefits" provided by the technology. Firms develop their own method of finding, training, and motivating their sales force. Successful printers look at their existing customers to determine who can benefit from on demand printing. Once salespeople grasp the benefits of digital, they can begin to develop a consultative sales approach and ask probing questions to learn everything possible about a job. Once they have all the details, they should examine the uses of each printed piece to discover ways digital printing can help improve their customers’ process. Resourceful people who find innovative and creative ways to do this are the most successful.

It's All About The Customer
It’s not just operators and sales personnel who need to be retrained. It’s also necessity to train customers. Digital printers soon learn that many of the old problems are still there. When receiving work from those who don’t have experience preparing files for printing, digital printers face a real challenge to generate a profit, to retain new business, and to meet customers’ expectations. Common problems include not converting images to CMYK from RGB, or images converted to CMYK in Quark instead of in PhotoShop and submitting files with missing fonts. Another major problem involves not including the high resolution scans on disk with the page layout.

Know what works best in your shop and pass this information along to your customers. This pro–active approach helps streamline the printing process, avoids last minute corrections and makes for happy customers. A solution for problem avoidance is to draw up working guidelines which can also include suggestions for file creation to obtain the quality output customers expect. Provide a checklist along with your guidelines and have your customer check off each item prior to sending you the file. Hosting client workshops is another good method of preempting problems before they crop up. Samples also become a terrific tool for setting standards and acceptance levels. Your sales force should be well armed with an ample supply of these. Samples should be given away freely to prospects, as they will subconsciously highlight the fact that the piece can be easily replicated, on demand.

Get Personal
One of the hottest topics today is CRM and relationship based marketing which utilize personalized & customized print runs. Printers adding this capability will need practical training on linking databases to print jobs. Here, there is a need for both printers and customers to learn what personalization can do, not only to increase demand, but to warn about risks. Most digital engine vendors like Xerox and Indigo offer this type of software program and provide training on its use. But, what if you don’t want to make the financial investment but need to offer this service? Fortunately, there are other solutions—outsource this service or partner with a service provider with experience in relationship marketing, or use one of the Internet, browser-based solutions like ePrint Advantage's 'e1to1 Mail'. These products provide four major functions: list management, ability to develop print based products, a mechanism to order and job processing of "print-ready" files.

Keep in mind that the cost of the printed piece accounts for less than 20% of the cost of the document. The remaining 80% comes from the value added services to support the actual printing. Why settle for 20% of the job when you can get 100%? Know your customer and remember that this is a consultative sale. You're not selling printing, you are actively trying to help the client solve his business problems. The printed piece is a by–product of that solution. When you only sell printing, the guy with the lowest unit cost wins. Price becomes king and there is nothing else to discuss. When you sell service, you retain the client from going elsewhere and the profit margins skyrocket.