Leadership. It is not the technology; it is not the number of features in the technology, it is not the technical prowess of your pre-press team. It is the business leadership that keeps the project on track according to clear business objectives. When technical people lead, the project becomes a technical project. You could very well end up having a technically perfectly implemented web-to-print solution with nobody using it. A business leader will make sure the focus remains on two important factors that can absolutely kill any success; adoption and engagement by your sales team and adoption and usage by your customers. The leadership of the web-to-print program has to be cross functional because the success of your program people across your company and most importantly the adoption by your customers.

You should NEVER give it away. I don’t mean you can’t discount it but you should always put a price on the setup of your web-to-print solution, which you can of course discount. Make sure the customer understands what it takes to do the setup, especially if they have a lot of variable data products. If you don’t communicate that understanding during the sales process, you’ll be doing those services for free forever and the customer will think nothing of changing their mind about products because there is no cost to them.

I think this is the biggest mistake of printers. I have sold web-to-print solutions to corporations and charged upwards of $7,500/month just for the technology because we focused on the value of having a centralized repository of their critical assets that can be distributed under a strict brand controlled system.