In the printing industry, service providers frequently view marketing and sales as a medicine to be taken when something is wrong. (So your business is down this quarter? Add some salespeople, do a little marketing, and you’ll feel better in the morning.) Yet the most successful companies recognize that proactive sales and marketing investments are vital to growing and driving business results.

In March 2015, McKinsey and Company published an article entitled Building Marketing and Sales Capabilities to Beat the Market. Authored by Bart Delmulle, Brett Grehan, and Vikas Sagar, this article discussed a recent benchmarking study involving 15,000 employees at more than 140 leading B2B and B2B2C global businesses. The survey findings were clear—revenue growth at companies with more advanced marketing and sales capabilities tended to be 30% greater than the average. This means that in an industry growing at 4% annually, a company in the top quartile of marketing and sales capabilities typically grows by about 5.3%.

These findings also apply to the printing industry. In InfoTrends’ recently completed study entitled Production Print Services in North America: Understanding Industry Transformation, over 400 print service providers were surveyed. Survey participants were asked about the share of their employees that fell into specific job categories. Companies that were experiencing growth of at least 10% placed a substantially higher emphasis on sales and marketing.