Selling Strategies For

25- Commercial Printers

This discussion covers how commercial printers approach the selling process including the elements, their strategy, and unique sales cycles.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another edition here at The Print University. This is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting, and of course, we have Pat McGrew from the McGrewGroup. And today, Pat, we are talking about the strategic way to approach selling if you are a commercial printer. 
    • [00:00:12] Pat McGrew: This is not a sales methodology presentation at all.
    • There are hundreds of them out there, and there are excellent people who would be delighted to walk you through things like Spin and Challenger and all sorts of other methodologies. Instead, what we are really looking at is just that sort of personal conversation that happens between the salespeople for the print shop and the customers that they serve.
    • The reason we want to approach it is that a sales team in a small print shop, a medium print shop, or a large print shop, still has the same requirements and responsibilities. So we want to make sure everybody understands them because, if you are not part of the sales team, it might be a little strange looking. Outside looking in, what are those people doing?
    • The first thing we want to talk about is what the sales team does, right? And they have an interesting job. They are not in prepress trying to do color matching, and they are not trying to fix files. What they are trying to do is maintain relationships with the people who do business with the company.
    • They work with existing customers, but they are always looking for new customers. Sometimes there is marketing help, but we know a lot of printing companies that do not actually have marketing organizations. The salespeople are responsible for being both hunters and gatherers, as well as farmers. They have to do all the jobs, and very often, these are the people who are the bridge between an unhappy customer and the people at the shop trying to make that customer happy by providing what they need. It is, in some ways,  a thankless job, except that salespeople are typically pretty well paid.
    • When you look at the circle, Ryan, does all of that make sense? If you're sitting inside a shop, do you recognize those things that the salespeople will have to do? 
    • [00:01:49] Ryan McAbee: I think before we even get into that, it is probably worth mentioning that different organizations set their sales teams and structures up differently.
    • What I mean by that is that if it is a repeat customer, the salesperson may not be the order taker part of that equation. That may pass off directly to the customer support representative and let the salespeople focus more on the hunting and gathering kind of stage, which is - go find that new business, always be prospecting and looking for it.
    • Obviously, you need to go through this order of events when you are trying to work with and find new prospects, which you hope will become new clients. So you have to first prepare, which means - do you understand what you actually can offer them, what your capabilities are in terms of printing, and the product set that you could naturally have?
    • Do you understand the business of the company that you are going to approach? In other words, do you understand how they market, who their customer set is, and what are their pain points in terms of just business operations? And maybe how your printed products can fit into that world?
    • Then you have to present that use case and basically say, these are the opportunities; these are the things that we can help you drive from a business perspective. And then it is the whole other kind of normal stuff. 
    • [00:02:50] Pat McGrew: And sort of the steps to close. And the funny thing is when we talk about handling objections, what we are really saying is - what does the sales team member do to convince their existing customer or the prospective customer that your company is the right one to do the work for them?
    • What are the offers they make? What are the sweeteners that they add to the proposition? The thing is that a lot of printing companies now have web-to-print portals. You mentioned that it might not always be a salesperson actually physically selling, but that initial contact today is probably still mostly a person making contact.
    • Then maybe the relationship transitions to an online relationship, but the salespeople will still be responsible for that relationship. They will still be going back; they will still be having conversations. Let's look at what it means to actually sell. So again, we are not going to tell you what methodology you should apply to your team, and in fact, many printing companies survive just fine without a selling methodology. They have got great salespeople who know their products, and they have the right contacts and the right industry verticals that they serve. They are very effective. But the best salespeople take the time to build for themselves a template of how they approach sales.
    • Part of that is understanding what the shop can actually print. Some of the more painful conversations we have had in organizations revolve around situations where the salespeople are not keeping up with what is going on in production. Maybe they have been working for the company for 25 or 30 years, but they actually have not been on the shop floor in ten.
    • A lot of equipment can come and go. Methodologies change; binding equipment, finishing equipment, cutting equipment, and printing equipment can all change. If they are still selling based on what they knew ten years ago, that is not helping anybody. The best salespeople typically will take time to keep up with what is going on and keep an eye on what other customers are buying, even if they are not their customers. You know what seems to be the new trend. Are people buying pull-up signs who used to buy foam core signs? Or are people buying wire-bound books that used to buy three-ring binder books? There are all sorts of things you keep your eye on, and the best salespeople usually have a box of samples that they can show and pull out when it is relevant to the conversation. But they are all really great storytellers. 
    • [00:05:03] Ryan McAbee: That is the hope, at least. I think that one of the things we have seen over time is that as we are trying to sell this kind of print product to our end customer, we assume that they know what is possible, like what things can actually be printed, and assume that they have a base understanding of how that actually happens and works, and what the return on investment or what the value proposition is for them to buy it from you. There is too much changeover in the world. If you look at it over the last couple of years, you often are dealing with different people, whether you are working with procurement, whether you are working with the management, or whoever you are working with at that organization. It may not be the same person you were working with last year.
    • You have to realize that you may have to do a lot more education than you had in the past just because of that alone.
    • [00:05:45] Pat McGrew: Especially in commercial print, where the range of products you might be selling can be pretty vast, right? Some commercial printers specialize in just a few things, but most of them have a lot of different things that they can provide.
    • The burden is on the salesperson to be constantly aware of what can be sold and what people are going to want to buy. 
    • [00:06:04] Ryan McAbee: I think the other thing, talking about stories... you do not want to be the first. Or you do not want to be the untested approach that is the first to try and take that leap of faith, so if you have someone that is in the same vertical or similar, the kind of company that profiles that way or in a tangential space that would be doing the same kind of work. If you can say, “Hey, look, this is what we did for another company that's similar to yours, and these were the results in terms of they added more people to their funnel or they increased their customer satisfaction score.”
    • Whatever the thing is that will resonate and be of value to that company, that is really the kind of storytelling.
    • [00:06:35] Pat McGrew: I think that helps a lot, right? That is a major part of the selling process, but of course, you just touched on it. You have to really have an ear to what the customer is trying to buy.
    • And that does not mean that you just listen to what they say and write an order, and try to provide it. The best salespeople have conversations to try and really understand what the purpose of the piece is going to be. And maybe the customer has it all spec'd out, and they know exactly what they want.
    • That does not necessarily mean it is the exact right piece. The funny thing about salespeople is that they see a lot of different things over time, and they are used to having a lot of different conversations. Very often, they can become the trusted advisor and especially in the commercial space where there is so much range of products.
    • Color quality and print quality, and substrate availability are just so much a part of the conversation. In addition, how fast can I get it? I had a print buyer say to me once that they narrowed the range of salespeople they work with down to those who will always tell them the substrate story. What is really available to me right now, and what other matching substrates do you have if I decide that I want to extend my campaign or now I want to mail something? Will you have matching envelopes? All those things. That person did not have to ask all those questions anymore. The salespeople who figured out what the triggers were and came to them with a story as soon as there was a job to bid on; they came with a complete story of how they could get that specific job done, but also similar jobs that might come along as part of the same campaign. That does not always work, but that was a criteria for them as a print buyer that the people that they were working with were going to be able to read their mind in a way. And buyers tend to rely on the people that they buy from. They expect the salesperson for the printing company to understand their needs, their color requirements, their deadlines, and find a path to making that happen if they want that.
    • [00:08:30] Ryan McAbee: That is true. I also look at it in this way. It is what, as the salesperson, what value add are you bringing to the transaction? Because it ultimately is a transaction at the end. And if you cannot bring more value than the customer going to an online print provider and plugging in the specifications for whatever product that they think they need, then you have a problem. 
    • [00:08:48] Pat McGrew: And especially in commercial print, I think that there is that real danger that there are so many online print providers these days, and many of them advertise on television or on the radio or on Sirius XM. You can put yourself in danger if you are not keeping track of your customers and their needs and not making it easy to do business with you.
    • That is where the offer becomes really important. It is important for the sales team members to understand what does this company do that sets them apart? Is it that we have the widest range of widths that we can print? Is it that we have very specific kinds of printing equipment that let us do everything from digital to litho to flexo? Is it that we have got the ability to print specific kinds of colors? We can do embellishment; we can do specialized kinds of finishing. What are all the things that make this company unique? And that becomes really important to making the offers. It is also part of the salesperson's mentality - is to figure out what the triggers in these unique offers might be for the buyers that they're talking to.
    • Somebody might have never asked you about embellishment or foiling, but you are looking around when you are talking to them, and it sure appears like everything they do is higher end. That is an opportunity to say we could take this job and do it just the way you asked, but we could add holographic glitter or some cold foiling or put color on the edge of your business cards. There are all kinds of things that we could do for you. It is important for them to know that, but the salesperson, at the end of the day, is working for the printing company. 
    • So one of the things that is important for them to keep in mind is how they price, and that is typically something the salesperson does in concert with the quoting and estimating team to make sure they understand all the costs that are involved and come up with the right profit, margin, and things.
    • More and more, we are watching printers get creative in how they approach the printing process. Say you have excess capacity on your third shift. You might enable your salespeople to say we can do it for this price, but if you are willing to let us do it on our third shift, we can do a better deal for you.
    • We can take 5% off, 3% off. We can knock something off in order to better use our capacity. You might actually get it faster because we run a third shift. There are all sorts of different games that I am watching printers offer or different things that they are doing to handle this challenge of one filling capacity, but also finding pricing that works for the range of customers that they are trying to talk to.
    • Commercial printers probably have it the worst when it comes to the current paper shortages and labor shortages. People who buy commercial print typically are very picky about the substrates that they use, especially if it is an agency buyer or brand buyer for campaigns. You have to learn to be adept at trying to figure out what kind of substrates you can actually offer and whether you can get them or not.
    • Figuring out how pricing might cause an impact. You might say we could do it on that substrate, but we can only get this much of it, but we can get this much of a different substrate, and we could offer a slightly different price. Developing offers and being able to talk about them in a conversational way, non-confrontational way is a really great way to approach the sales process. In commercial printing, understanding what you have to sell, understanding your company's pricing policies, delivery policies, discounting policies, is all part of the process. 
    • [00:12:01] Ryan McAbee: I would also say there is a term you will hear if you have been into the industry; basically, do not pitch speeds and feeds. Do not go to that very technical jargon-heavy kind of approach because whoever is on the receiving end of that is probably not going to really either understand it very well or may not even be a point of concern that they even care about as part of the sales process.
    • It is definitely one thing to understand your capabilities in terms of what you can offer from the print shop itself.  But I think the way I have seen it work absolutely the best is that you understand enough about your customer's business, and you marry that with the kind of solution set that you can bring to them from your full portfolio of things that you offer.
    • Doing that is really where it comes together really nicely. Pat, any last parting words here? 
    • [00:12:41] Pat McGrew: I am going to encourage everyone to watch the others in our selling strategy series. If you work in direct mail or transaction or wide format, or you are a franchise, we have some other words of wisdom that we want to share.
    • The whole set is there to help you understand how to engage with the sales team and, if you're part of the sales team, the things that you should be looking for. 
    • [00:12:58] Ryan McAbee: Excellent. Thanks for joining us for this episode here at The Print University, and we hope to see you on the next one. 

26- IN-PLANT PRINTERS

This episode focuses on in-plant selling propositions. It covers how to best promote the capabilities of the in-plant to generate awareness and adoption within the parent organization.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome again to another edition here at The Print University. This is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting, and of course, we have Pat McGrew from the McGrewGroup. And today, Pat, we are going to talk about selling strategies for In-plants, which is a head-scratcher in a way because some in-plants do not really consider themselves as selling.
    • [00:00:14] Pat McGrew: Yeah. But everybody does, right? Sales is part of every department in any kind of corporate enterprise. You just do not always call it that. When you are talking about an in-plant, you are talking about a print operation that is typically serving a company. In the old days, we used to call them copy-repro departments - CRDs.
    • They have grown because instead of having a fleet of copy machines and people standing there photocopying things like crazy, and then putting them into binders to send off back to the different departments that they are serving - today it is as likely that an in-plant might have offset equipment.
    • They might even have flexo equipment. They probably have some digital equipment. They may have wide-format equipment. So they really are like a full commercial print shop. They may even do transactional work in some of the in-plants. But it is all done within the four walls, and it is typically done, in many cases, as a cost center and not necessarily a profit center.
    • These organizations need to be watching their costs. They need to be watching their pennies. They need to be providing services because in most organizations, if the in-plant cannot do the work, the departments are free to go somewhere else and get the work done. In some cases, if somebody outside can do the work cheaper, even if it could be done in-house - and cheaper is always a relative term - a department might be free to go outside.
    • Some companies do not even make you go to the in-plant. If you need print work done, they let you do whatever you want. In those organizations, somebody has got to be making the case to the internal departments that there is a reason to bring the work to the in-plant, right? That in-plant is there to serve the needs of the departments that are inside the enterprise.
    • Somebody needs to hold that relationship. So it really is a sales job. Some in-plants are also free to do work for outside organizations. It is not always true. Some are not. A lot of government in-plants are actually free to offer their services to other governmental entities outside of their four walls.
    • For instance, we have mentioned in other episodes the State of Colorado, where I live. Their in-plant is actually doing work for a lot of the counties and a lot of the municipalities across Colorado. They have found a way to make that an economical proposition for those counties so that they do not have to operate many print shops, and the state has economies of scale that make it really easy for them. 
    • Enterprises often allow their organizations to offer services. One of the ones that I used to know very well was Firestone Bridgestone, who actually, in the end, separated their in-plant out and turned it into a separate company because they were so successful as a printing company doing outside work for people.
    • They had all their ducks in a row and were very good at it. Definitely, in those organizations where you are pitching to outsiders, you need to have salespeople. Salespeople really do exist in an in-plant environment. They have a slightly different job depending on who they are trying to serve.
    • But they are still responsible for maintaining relationships even inside a large corporate enterprise or a medium size corporate enterprise. The salesperson may be responsible for going to departments that are not currently using their services and making that same kind of sales pitch that you would make if you were going to an outside potential customer.
    • They are doing all the same things a commercial salesperson or a transaction or a DM salesperson might be doing, but they are doing it with a few more constraints on how they can operate. 
    • [00:03:26] Ryan McAbee: There are definitely some nuances or versions of the in-plant. And I would encourage you to go watch the Inside the In-plant episode because we go through, in more detail, the operating principle for them in terms of whether they are cost recovery or for profit in terms of their business model, which will impact how the sales team is also structured. We also go through different flavors of in-plants because there could be ones that are centered more around education; they could be ones for business enterprises.
    • [00:03:51] Pat McGrew: And they all behave a little differently. They have different needs because of the services that they are working with. 
    • [00:03:55] Ryan McAbee: We have worked with a fair amount of in-plants. I think the thing that is interesting about that is that, especially if they scale towards the smaller size of the in-plant, there usually is no single person that has a true focused role.
    • It is usually that each one wears multiple hats in terms of the functions that they provide for the in-plant, and so often, the salesperson, so to speak, might actually be the head or the lead of the in-plant that is operating, too. 
    • [00:04:18] Pat McGrew: That is often the case. Sometimes it is the person that you might call the customer service representative because they have the most common contact with the different departments that they are serving.
    • There are a lot of different ways. Often in an in-plant, what you said is absolutely correct. Everybody in the in-plant is also a salesperson because everybody in the in-plant may be dealing with direct customer communication, direct customer contact, and pitching the next job while they're delivering the job they just finished.
    • That is not unusual at all. In-plants are less likely to have sales team members that are running one of the commercial print selling strategies. They are less likely to be doing a Spin or a Challenger kind of selling methodology. Typically, their selling methodology is based on the constraints of their in-plant. What are they allowed to sell, and how are they allowed to interact with the different departments? Who are they allowed to talk to? 
    • In some organizations, it is highly constrained and structured. In others, it is much more casual. They have to bend their methodology to what is allowed in their environment and whether they're dealing with internal organizations or external organizations.
    • They have to be a jack of all trades when it comes to figuring out how to sell, to whom, and what they can sell. They have those same things that we saw in commercial and DM and wide-format where they have to understand what they can do. In-plants often grow to become everything to everybody. 
    • They will have a wide-format device sitting over in the corner because sometimes they need employee-facing posters and event posters, and maybe even wayfinding signs and things. They have devices for that. They may have offset or flexo-type devices because they are doing long-run high-quality work, depending on the nature of what they're trying to serve.
    • Then they may have digital devices as well. That may be anything from smaller sheet-fed up to high-volume, high-speed, roll-fed inkjet devices. Because they can have all kinds of different things, and they may be getting rid of some equipment over time, bringing in new equipment over time, it's incumbent on them to understand.
    • The good news about being inside an in-plant is that the people who are selling are usually right there. It is not like they are remote - five cities away or five states away. They are normally right there, embedded with the in-plant production team. It is very easy for them to be aware of changes in finishing capabilities and sign printing capabilities and mounting capabilities, and all those things. If you are getting the idea that they have to know everything, they do. If you listen to our other selling episodes on wide-format and franchise selling and commercial selling and direct mail selling, all of those things apply in an in-plant. In many cases, they are doing all that kind of work. 
    • For them, having some samples that they can show - very often, they do not have to have them in a case that is transportable. Sometimes it can just be a display in the lobby that they can show people who are internal. They will still need a story.
    • Sometimes the story to develop in an in-plant is a little bit harder because if it is an in-plant that is charging back, they are going to have a story that makes that make sense from a chargeback perspective to the departments that they are trying to engage. If they are simply operating as a cost center to the enterprise, and print jobs are not individually charged back, it is a slightly different kind of conversation.
    • So all of these things are going to influence the kinds of selling stories that get developed. Again, because the person doing the selling might be doing any of a number of other jobs. Sometimes these teams need a little bit of sales training to help them develop the stories.
    • [00:07:41] Ryan McAbee: I think the upside, though, is that they, unlike some of the other types of print providers that we have talked about, have deep institutional knowledge. They definitely know the company. They know the company's purpose, the mission, and how they operate. They know the departments and probably the key players within those departments.
    • They have that aspect going for them. I think the thing that really resonated with me is, going through it, that it is all about policies and processes in terms of the sales process. Because sometimes the policies are in favor of the in-plant in the institution, in terms of where they have to source printed materials and so forth. Sometimes those policies are not so friendly, and they can go outside and do a lot of other things. 
    • [00:08:12] Pat McGrew: Dealing inside an educational institution is a different ballgame than inside of a state or governmental institution versus inside a big bank or a big brokerage. They are all going to play by slightly different rules and have different cultural needs.
    • [00:08:25] Ryan McAbee: I think from a process perspective, it is very process driven. There are usually very well-defined timelines in terms of turnarounds. There are defined processes in terms of how you submit a ticket or a work order for the sales process. The one thing I do find that we find commonly when we work with in-plants is that from the buyer, there is usually a disconnect. The disconnect comes in two forms: I think disconnect number one is the people that work inside the enterprise may not be aware of the full capability set of the in-plant. This obviously impacts their ability to sell or produce the products because they will go elsewhere; they don't think the in-plant can fulfill it.
    • Then the other part of that is they often do not understand, at the department level, the kind of print needs that they have and match those capabilities up with the demand. 
    • [00:09:07] Pat McGrew: I think there is a lot of that, and it is very easy to say if it is an in-plant, everybody understands what is here, right?
    • Yet I have been in large insurance organizations where we encountered departments that did not even know there was an in-plant. Because nobody knew, a new manager came in, and no one ever told them that there was this in-plant ready to do their bidding. A lot of these in-plants have gotten really smart. They not only print, they can do print and mail, but they can also do e-delivery of communication as well. Many of them have gotten very good at managing whole customer communication management systems for the benefit of the enterprise or the institution.
    • This is where the selling side becomes really important in a way that you might not have initially thought when you were talking about an in-plant. Buyers only know what they're told in terms of capabilities and opportunities. So we have got to get out there, and we have got to understand how to communicate with them. It is also incumbent on the in-plant to be testing ideas and surveying the departments to find out what their needs are so that they can be absolutely positive that they are providing the kinds of products and services they need. 
    • When we talk about color quality requirements, in some organizations they just do not care. If the print is getting done, they are good. Out the door, it is fine, right?
    • In others, where the logo is very important to the organization, color quality requirements are highly important. If it is an organization that does a lot of internal and external marketing, color can be a really important thing. And as you mentioned, turnaround requirements.
    • I love assessments. I think assessments are a really good thing to do. It is one of these things that very often in-plants do not do. They do not do self-assessments from the production side, and they do not do buyer assessments. And this is one of those things that can really lift the level of the relationship and the level of engagement - by going out, asking them what they need, and then coming back and demonstrating that you heard them. You can provide what they need, and you can make recommendations on things they might not know they need. 
    • [00:10:59] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely. I think there are a few kinds of best practices in this area. One is that you need to be tied into your employee onboarding process to instill that awareness when the employee comes in. Like you said, there is attrition in these organizations. You have employee turnover, people go, they come, et cetera, and you wanna make sure anybody coming in knows that the in-plant is there, what your capabilities are, and how to basically work with the in-plant.
    • Another best practice, I think, ties in with that. Often some kind of online portal to order through that is linked with your enterprise website or however people normally engage to learn about the organization. I think that is another natural tie-in to funnel more business in.
    • I think a third one is to do that kind of assessment with the end users in the department because you need to survey them. Not only what do they need, but how are you performing and meeting their needs currently? They will be eye-opening in terms of how you can adjust the in-plant practices to more and better meet the needs of the constituents, their users. 
    • [00:11:53] Pat McGrew: It is a really great idea for the in-plant to have a good relationship with the IT department as well. Because the IT department typically knows what all of the enterprise software that's being used is. They have made the installations; they have tied things together.
    • They are the people who can be most effective at ensuring that the in-plant is the first stop for print for anything being generated by all these other systems. That is a really good relationship to have. The other thing that you want to make sure of is that as you are doing your assessment, you understand all the tools that are in the enterprise that can generate print.
    • A lot of organizations have multiple variable data programs that they are using. They might have five or six of them. They might have multiple customer communication management systems, and multiple creative content systems. They might be using some online systems. They might be using some on-prem systems.
    • If those systems are not tied in to feed to the in-plant, then the people operating those programs may never know you're there. Again, that is the link between IT, the in-plant, and the systems that are out there become really important. You can uncover a lot of the missing links by doing an assessment, right?
    • [00:12:58] Ryan McAbee: Then we are talking about the offer. For me, it really comes down to how you are differentiating yourself versus the printer that they may outsource to. We often hear that one of the biggest proponents of using the in-plant is that they're physically there. They can go talk to them, especially if they are unsure what they need for a project. They may want to go talk to someone at the in-plant and say, “what are my options here?” If I am doing this kind of booklet, do I want to have it saddle-stitch, or does it have too many pages in it? And I need to do some kind of binding technique. You can get that kind of expertise usually within the same building you're sitting at. Then I think the other thing that is always a balancing act is often in-plant users, or people in the printer that use the in-plant, like the fact that there is usually a quick turnaround time that they can get that they feel is more at jeopardy if they outsource. Again, that is a balancing act. I think in-plants should strive for very quick turnaround times, especially on products or with departments that they know need that kind of service.
    • [00:13:47] Pat McGrew: Most of them do. Most of the in-plants that I have been involved with over the years are highly sensitive to turnaround time requirements. One of the places that I see in-plants not quite following what I think of as best practices is that they don't control the outsourcing conversations.
    • The company does not have a policy that requires outsourcing still to be handled through the in-plant. Even if somebody has decided that we know we could do it in-house, we prefer to go to this printer. The department should not hold that relationship. The in-plant should. Very often, the in-plant can find paths to providing things more economically because if they hold the relationship, there is more work that may be transpiring there. They get better trade discounts as opposed to a department that just pops into the local quick printer and decides to get some brochures printed. That has happened all the time. Even for specialty work, like maybe large format signs, things that are not actually the in-plant's capability. The in-plant is more likely to get a good price based on a trade relationship than having somebody run out to a local quick printer or a sign printer to get the same work done.
    • [00:14:47] Ryan McAbee: The likelihood that they can spec it correctly increases with the in-plant because they have more knowledge about the printing process in general than somebody that works in the accounting department or the marketing department. I think that is another value add of having the work, even if it is going to be outsourced, at least funnel through the in-plant and have them manage it as you say. 
    • [00:15:04] Pat McGrew: One of the best practices that we are seeing rising in in-plants is the use of online ordering. The request comes through an online portal into the in-plant. Years ago, when they were copy-repro departments, somebody showed up at a desk with a pile of paper and handed it over and said I need it in an hour.
    • That was the relationship. Today there are so many well-done in-plant-specific kinds of portal systems that make it possible for the in-plant to really lock down the specifications and not allow work to come in that is not spec'd correctly. At the very least, if somebody attempts to spec it incorrectly, it can open a chat window so that conversations can be had to understand what's really the requirement that someone is trying to buy.
    • That is making the life for in-plant production better, I think, because you can lock those things down; but it is not universal yet. There are still any number of in-plants that are out there operating with the show up at the counter mentality, or attach a file to an email and hope they can print it mentality or drop it in a hot folder and pray that it can be scheduled and delivered in a timely manner.
    • Understand the in-plant that you are working with and what your constraints are. If there is any opportunity to go to an online portal to capture most of the work coming in, that is always a great thing to do. If it is currently coming in by email or dropping into a hot folder, you have a harder job.
    • Trying to figure out the cost of handling it becomes a very late binding thing. That means the customer, the departmental customer, does not always know what they are going to be charged until after the job is printed. That is one of the big things that we are trying to change in in-plants across the networks. We are trying to get them to be able to provide a good estimate at the front end of the job because all the constraints are understood, all the finishing requirements, and delivery requirements are understood, so they know exactly what their chargeback or any cost that might be allocated to them will be.
    • [00:16:49] Ryan McAbee: A great online portal for an in-plant becomes another salesperson, an inside salesperson for the organization and for the in-plant. You are able to engage with it across the enterprise, and it has all that pricing and structure built into it. It automates your processes downstream from that point. I completely agree with that. 
    • [00:17:06] Pat McGrew: And sometimes they can be linked, right? Sometimes the portal that the people inside the business or inside the educational institution see - they may not even know that some of that work will be automatically outsourced to a trade printer. Because they do not need to know it.
    • All they need to know is that - Hey, look, I can order t-shirts. Who knew I could order t-shirts? Look at this. I can order long sleeve t-shirts, short sleeve t-shirts and polo shirts. I can get everything I need on them. And look, it will deliver in this timeframe, and here is my cost per shirt. The fact that those t-shirts are not being printed in the in-plant is irrelevant. Because they have a single order portal, it gives them all the information they need, and the order gets delivered back to them. That is another advantage of using these portals. It manages the engagement process, and it means that the job of the salesperson is to just keep everybody informed about what is possible. Keep the engagement going and find new opportunities in the organization.
    • They do not have to worry as much about the down-and-dirty production details. 
    • [00:17:58] Ryan McAbee: I think, in summary, the selling for an in-plant your sales staff or people may look slightly different than what we see in other segments of the print industry. No doubt, there is a process for selling the services and the products that the in-plant can produce, and how it works within each organization might vary slightly, but it is still a process to manage.
    • With that said, thank you for joining us today on this episode at The Print University, and we hope to see you on a future one very soon.

27- DIRECT MAIL PRINTERS

Direct mail sales is covered in this module. it requires an understanding of the clients’ customers and their business cycles to become their printer of choice.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another edition here at The Print University. Today, Pat McGrew and I are going to be talking about selling strategies in the direct mail space. We all know direct mail. We get it in our inbox all the time, our mailbox, I should say. We all have some familiarity with what it looks like and what it smells like. How it feels. But there is more about it in terms of how you are figuring out how to sell it effectively. 
    • [00:00:21] Pat McGrew: Yeah, because if you have been in any of our other episodes, especially when we talk about direct mail, we talk about the fact that direct mail comes in a lot of sizes, shapes, flavors, bindings, finishes, packaging.
    • It comes in all sorts of ways. For a salesperson in the direct mail space, it becomes really important to understand the box that they are living in, in terms of what their shop can produce, either in-house or with trade relationships. It also becomes very important for them to understand the customer's products that they are trying to sell with this direct mail. If you are dealing with a customer who has a single product, they have one set of needs. If you are dealing with somebody who is selling thousands of products, they are going to have slightly different needs.
    • So you become the master - the orchestra leader, if you will - in trying to help them understand all the possibilities. In all of our sales episodes, we use this graphic to talk about prospecting, preparing, and all the way around to the follow-up. Most salespeople understand this because they follow methodologies; either one that they have developed themselves or one that they are following from one of the commercial sales methodology providers, like a Spin or a Challenger, that help them normalize the way they handle a customer relationship. 
    • It is still incumbent on the salesperson to understand the products that they have to sell, the business that they are representing, and the customers that they are serving. Not just existing customers but potential new customers. Every one of them will have slightly different needs and slightly different desires.
    • The wonderful thing about direct mail is that this is one of those spaces that is a crossover space because it has all the creativity of commercial print and marketing design and MarTech bolted onto a little bit of data - and in some cases, a lot of data - which requires security and management of customer data very similar to what happens in a transaction printing.
    • The sales team has to be aware of exactly who its customer is and what they really want. Do they want a lot of static postcards that have no use of data except for the name and address? Or is this a bespoke catalog that is reaching into the buyer's history to figure out exactly what products are going to get extracted from the product information system and placed into a catalog template and addressed personally to Ryan, because we know that Ryan only buys blue suits and blue shirts and blue ties? Why would we ever show him a picture of a tweed jacket with a brown tie, right? Direct mail can be as simple as possible, and it can be as complex as transaction print. The salespeople have to understand where on the spectrum the company that they are representing sits.
    • [00:03:00] Ryan McAbee: I think it blends that sales approach too. The fact is that in the commercial world, it is common that you print one job for one customer, and they may not come back to you ever, or they may not come back to you for six months, or whatever the case is. Where in direct mail, it is usually not a single touchpoint that you're going to mail. It is a series in a campaign, so the way you approach that from a sales perspective is a bit different.
    • [00:03:22] Pat McGrew: It is. I mentioned that they walk that line between sort of commercial and transactional because many direct mail relationships are contractual because of that campaign aspect. They know that they have to do five mailings over the course of six months in the run-up to the holiday season. They know their data proves to them that if they can touch a mailbox five times, they are more likely to see a different level of sale than if they only touch it one time or two times.
    • That colors the selling methodology for the salesperson. Are they approaching somebody that is looking for a contractual relationship, or is this a one-off, or is it a test run? I am going to sell them one, and then I am hoping to do it for them to come back and buy the next six.
    • There are a lot of different variations, and because it is marketing mail, there is not as much regulation in the US. You go to Europe, you go to other geographies, and some of this is regulated. In the US, we are not really regulated with our marketing mail. From a sales perspective, we want to be able to leverage all the power that we have within our company, sifting through data and pulling nuggets out on behalf of our customer. That is a service we might be offering. Alternatively, taking data the customer has already sifted through and said they want to use. Then working with the customer and their designer to figure out how to leverage that data for a direct mail piece that will actually cause a sale.
    • It is more complex than transaction in many ways because there is a designer usually involved, and sometimes there are marketing agencies involved. At the very least, there is a company owner involved who actually owns the need to send that direct mail marketing out. That sales relationship is typically a different kind of relationship.
    • [00:04:59] Ryan McAbee: I like the bullet point here: develop a story that will resonate. I think that is understanding and capturing what is the intent or what is the purpose of them needing or wanting to send a mail piece. If it is one of those consumer protection kinds of notices for a product recall, they do not care about the graphics. They do not care about the color. They do not care about a regulatory notice that has to be delivered in a certain timeframe. So the salesperson can talk all you want about the other thing, but it is not going to matter to them. Frankly, you will lose some validity and what your capabilities are if you approach it in the wrong way, just because you are completely off on what the intent is or what the purpose is of the direct mail that they are trying to do.
    • [00:05:30] Pat McGrew: We do not need a lot of embellishment and foiling and color on a regulatory recall. If I want to attract you into my nail salon, my restaurant, my real estate practice, or my car dealership, then I am going to be looking for those things. If I bought a list or I am doing what they call Every Door Direct Mail, then I am selling them the ability to get into all the mailboxes in a specific ZIP code. That is where being able to sell something that is a little bit more upmarket, a little bit more interesting, and a little bit more intriguing can help the customer in the long run. The salesperson has to understand where they are in their processes. Are they acquiring that new customer? Are they acquiring, or are they working with existing customers? What kind of communication are they trying to push into the market? 
    • [00:06:09] Ryan McAbee: Some of that, obviously, is understanding the buyer's needs. We talked about that here. Is it a successful multi-touch campaign from the direct mail perspective? In a lot of cases, it is complimentary, right? It is mail with other electronic forms engaging the customer, too. Where does that fit in, and how do you take the big funnel of people coming in, maybe on the first pass of the direct mail or the electronic campaign, working together with it, and then how do you eventually funnel it down? Then maybe the product set that you offer will evolve with that, too. Once you get the fifth mailing out, you realize the motivation of some of those buyers. You can go to that more costly, embellishment kind of route to have the call to action and get them to do something because the piece itself looks different. What you are offering is different. 
    • [00:06:46] Pat McGrew: The size of the company that you are dealing with has a lot to do with it, too. If you are dealing with a single shop, like a nail salon, their marketing budget is not probably going to be fabulous. If you are dealing with an organization that is a local restaurant chain or a local car repair chain, where their turnover is in the millions, they have a little bit of money that they want to spend. The way they approach the market might be different, as well.
    • As a salesperson, you have to become a quick read. You have to be able to read the room really fast when you are talking. Whether they come to you as a cold call - They call you and go, "Hey, I need some printing." - or you are approaching them because you know they are out there, and you know that you can do printing for them - the salesperson really has to be quick at understanding what kind of budgets we might be looking at. Are we looking at somebody who wants to mail postcards or somebody who wants to do a catalog? Are we looking at somebody who is looking for a package that might be direct mail plus maybe some e-communication and maybe some SMS communication and maybe some signs, too? We are going to run some specials, and we want some signs to support it in the venue. 
    • This is one of those spaces where salespeople have a lot of room to stretch. What they sell beyond the direct mail piece - in most cases, there's an opportunity. Restaurants might need menus, might need signs. All of these places might need other things, and direct mail is a way to start the conversation, but it does not have to be the way you end it. 
    • [00:08:02] Ryan McAbee: The other thing you have to do, especially if it is anybody that is net new to maybe doing a bunch of direct mail, is you have to educate them a little bit on the actual mailing component. Not in terms of cost, but in terms of the technical requirements that you will need. Because you might need to close it up with tabs, or you might need to put additional coatings on it, so it is more resistant to the sorting equipment in terms of rubbing the print. 
    • [00:08:21] Pat McGrew: You have to be able to tell the story to explain the extra costs.
    • They might think that they are just buying a piece of cardstock with some printing on it and slapping it out the door. In fact, in order to mail something, it has to be robust enough to get through everything the USPS can throw at it, or any national post can throw at it. Different kinds of mechanical equipment. It is being sorted. All sorts of things are happening. You have to be able to not only sell the piece but all the things that need to be done to that piece. 
    • You might bundle it into a single charge. But some companies say, if you want this kind of coating, it is going to be this. You want this kind of coating. It is going to be that. If you want to wafer tab, it is this, and if it is a glue line, it is going to be that. There are a lot of variations, and you have got to be able to articulate why this customer should want to go this way. Try and make the sale based on what you know is going to be best for them.
    • [00:09:01] Ryan McAbee: In terms of making the offer, in the commercial and the transaction world, it is more of a line-item approach. You get a quote back from a commercial printer, it has this minimum quantity, this stock, etc. Whereas in the direct mail space, you think about it holistically, where you do not break it down. If you break it down that way, it leads to the transaction mentality of “I'm only going to do this once.” Where in reality, you need to do multiple touchpoints.
    • [00:09:19] Pat McGrew: Or you start negotiating. You try to negotiate things out. I do not want to pay for the sorting. I do not want to pay for the ZIP code sorting. I do not want to pay for the coating. I do not want to pay for the wafer tab. “I have to pay for the wafer tab because I am folding something in half?” Again, the art of the sale here is the salesperson being able to explain the things that are needed in order to get the direct mail piece out the door in a way that is appropriate for the business that piece is representing, without turning it into a line item contest.
    • There are things you want to bundle. There are things that you might want to offer as an add-on, but you want to be very strategic about what you separate out and what you do not separate out. It really is different from the commercial, and the transaction space, where we tend to be more line-item oriented.
    • Even when you look at franchises in wide-format, you find slightly different approaches to how that sale is made and what is included in it. In direct mail, it really does depend on whether you are talking about a postcard campaign or direct mail campaign, or maybe you're sending out boxes; it could be all sorts of things. You want to make sure that you are establishing the criteria for what is going to be included and that your customer really does understand it. The thing to remember about direct mail buyers is that they come in all levels of experience. In most cases, in transaction they know what they are doing. Most commercial buying is handled by agencies, in many cases, and they are professionals. A direct mail buyer might be the guy who is running the local car repair place who really just has no idea what's required. It is important not to assume a level of knowledge. 
    • Do not throw terms around. “We got a CASS sorted.” Who is going to know what that means? “I need to wafer tab it.” If you do not know what that means, it does not sound like you should be paying for it. Part of the offer is making sure that you are speaking in a language that your customer can understand.
    • The first read the salesperson has to make is - how experienced is this person that I am working with? 
    • [00:10:53] Ryan McAbee: Even the things that have been around for years at this point, if you ask ten people on the street, you may get five that know what Every Door Direct Mail is. It takes a lot of time for things to filter out there. As you said, their core purpose is not focusing on how I get direct mail out to my customer to prospect. Their core purpose is running the business that they have at hand and how to generate more of that. You are trying to help them do that.
    • [00:11:13] Pat McGrew: Yep, this is true marketing using mail, and it drags along all of the weight that means. Again, I would recommend that everybody go and listen to the other elements of the sales strategies.
    • The transaction, the commercial, the wide-format, and the franchise. I think in each one of these we will give you some slightly different views of what the selling responsibilities are. It can only help expand your knowledge. 
    • [00:11:36] Ryan McAbee: Also, what is unique about each one versus the other ones? That is really where you get a lot of the insights as we go through these different strategies. With that said, thank you for joining us, and we hope to see you on the next episode here at The Print University.

28- TRANSACTIONAL PRINTERS

In the transaction print space there is a lengthy sales process driven by contractual and service level agreements. This module explains the process.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello, and welcome to another edition here at The Print University. This is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting, and we have Pat from the McGrewGroup here. And today, we are going to talk about some thought starters around how you should approach your strategy for selling transaction print because it is unique.
    • It is not like the world of commercial printing or wide-format printing. It has its own unique characteristics. 
    • [00:00:19] Pat McGrew: It certainly does. Transaction printing, as we have mentioned in other modules, is the printing of things that we think of as regulated. It is bills and statements. It is also government communications, regulatory communications, agency communications, - things like that. It is not the kind of thing that somebody goes to a web-to-print site commercially and just plops in there. In fact, that might not be permitted because, typically, transaction work has a lot of security built into it.
    • There are usually contractual arrangements and requirements for audits. It is a messy business. The sales teams that are involved do a lot of the things that a typical salesperson might do in commercial or wide-format or even in the franchise, but they do it a little differently. They would not typically just show up at the door and ask the secretary, “Who is the person that buys print?” These are the kinds of relationships that very often start with something called a Request for Quote or a Request for Proposal. The insurance company, the bank, or the government agency has a need for print. They basically put together their list of what they want, and they send it out to known organizations that are typically listed and that they have already vetted.
    • Transaction printing is not something that usually just starts up by itself. For the most part, transaction printing for an organization is something that has been going on for some time. Occasionally there is a net new player that needs transaction printing. A lot of this work moves from printing company to printing company based on these Requests for Quote or Requests for Proposal. Companies are looking for a better price or more security, or a more modern approach to handling their needs.
    • The salesperson is partly a security expert, partly a contract negotiation expert, and partly an expert in whatever the industry is that their customer is in, whether it is banking, finance, insurance, or health. They wind up becoming jacks of all trades and actually have to be masters of quite a few of them in order to be able to work in the industry. As you look around, you will find that people who work in the transaction space tend to stay. A lot of the salespeople that I know who came in when they were in their twenties, right out of college with maybe a shiny MBA and a desire to sell, don't leave it. Once they develop that expertise, they become really valuable. A good salesperson in the transaction space is beyond valuable to the company they work for because they understand the whole circle of life around sales, from prepare, analyze, pitch, all the way around to following up. They understand all of it, and they approach it very gently. They approach it knowing that almost everything they do is going to be bound by non-disclosure agreements, which is another facet of the transaction industry.
    • [00:02:52] Ryan McAbee: It takes time, obviously, to build up that domain expertise in that industry that you're selling into. A perfect example of that, I think, is the medical industry and pharmaceuticals. If you do not know what an EOB is, you are probably not going to go very far.
    • It is all that vernacular. It is all the business processes of that industry and how it functions. All the different relationships that they have with everything that you really do have to know. One thing I am curious about, though, Pat, is that some of the contract cycles shortened in this space. There are more opportunities, it seems, in turnover situations with more of these RFQs because we are not talking about maybe five years' worth of a contract anymore.
    • [00:03:25] Pat McGrew: I have been working in the transactions space since the eighties. In the eighties and nineties, a typical transaction contract might be five to eight years. The reason for that is that the buyer of the print was typically asking the print provider to invest in new equipment or new processes in order to be able to do the work that needed to be done in the very tight windows it needs to be done in.
    • It was not unusual for a print service provider in the transaction space to go out and buy five or six or seven brand new roll-fed digital presses in order to accomplish the work that was being contracted. In fact, some of them bought offset presses to build pre-printed rolls and then put them onto digital devices to print the black print. They would make that investment, and the way they justified the investment was the long-term contract that they signed with their customers. They knew they were underwater for the first few years, and then slowly, they would be more profitable over time. 
    • Today, we do not see that length of contract. It started to get shorter. It went to five years, then three. I have seen one-year contracts. They are painful. No one likes them. Things are changing so rapidly in our industry. Technologies are changing, and presses are getting faster, finishing is getting faster. In some of these contracts, the buyer of the print does not want to be held hostage to a new piece of equipment that was bought.
    • They are willing to sign up for a period of time that they are comfortable with so that they can then go shop for new prices at the end of that contract. There is never a guarantee that just because you got the contract this time, you will get the contract next time. Even if you have bent over backward and bought new equipment, there are no guarantees.
    • It is all about the price, and it is all about the security. Those two things, in concert, are what the salespeople who manage these relationships have to become - part psychologist, part artist - in order to make it all come together. To be able to keep their customer confident in their ability to continue to produce the work. 
    • The transaction space is an area that has been hit by hackers. Cyber security problems, and fishing expeditions, because private data is what is going on in the transaction space. It is your private health data, your private financial data. This is what is being managed in all these transactions. It is an area that everybody is very worried about. As a salesperson, you want to make your customer absolutely drop-dead confident that you have the security required to handle the work that is going to come. That it can't escape. It can't leak. People cannot be sitting around reading Tom Brady's 401K plan. You do not want any of that going on. 
    • You want to be able to demonstrate that you have the ability to handle high volumes of work at high speed. It is not to say that these buyers are not worried about color. They are very worried about their logo colors. That is not to say that they are not interested in seeing print samples and things. They typically are. They want to see what you have done. The hardest thing in transaction is to show live print samples to a potential customer because they probably belong to their competitor. You wind up in a difficult situation. 
    • This is an area where you never want to misspeak. Salesmanship sometimes includes a little puffery. I am trying to be nice. This is not a space where puffery works. It is the dragnet approach; just the facts. That is what gets you the level of confidence with your customer.  
    • [00:06:38] Ryan McAbee: It is not just the print output here, right? The transactional printers have been expanding the amount of services to attach or bolt onto these things. Another point of differentiation, if your company offers it, is the ease of working with you.
    • That comes across if there are portals that they could self-service through or view proofs through and approve those in that way. There are many different kinds of value adds that are coming. 
    • [00:07:00] Pat McGrew: If you can offer that, it makes a huge amount of difference. Approval management, quick response to questions, testing, right? Testing is a big part of the transaction space because your transaction data begins in some sort of system that might still be sitting on an old mainframe. It might be sitting in the cloud, might be sitting in a network. If you think about it, every time you go to the store and you buy something with your credit card, that information is captured, and it is a record of that transaction. It goes back into this giant database. It is that database that gets used to print your credit card statement. There is a lot of interesting manipulation that goes on there. You want to make sure that your customer is confident that you are going to be able to take the data in the format that they are prepared to deliver it. In some cases, in the transaction space, they will actually deliver the data to the printing company, and the printing company does a kind of a mail merge. They merge the data into an electronic template for delivery on paper, or maybe e-delivered to an email, or maybe even to your phone. We can do all sorts of channels for this type of delivery, but the printing company actually does that. They have the systems and tools to do it. 
    • At other times the transaction buyer delivers the print-ready file to the printer. From a selling perspective, you charge differently for those things. The way you're going to have to work with the file, the potential for bad files showing up, and the time needed to fix files. Most printers will tell you they would rather not get a print-ready file, and some printers actually charge more. From a selling perspective, that is just something that you want to understand - what your company wants to accept and what your customers want to deliver to you. 
    • [00:08:33] Ryan McAbee: It matches up with whatever your processes are and also your expertise in your workflow. How it is basically built because you want to hit that center line and not vary from what you do well. 
    • [00:08:42] Pat McGrew: Transaction comes in all flavors. There are people who specialize in transaction for healthcare or transaction printing for home insurance or car insurance. The reason they specialize is because each one of those companies tends to deliver data in a slightly different way.
    • [00:08:56] Ryan McAbee: We had a fun conversation around medical electronic records and those kinds of systems delivering the input. 
    • [00:09:02] Pat McGrew: Some of those systems do not deliver data in the best way, and that makes it a little bit tricky. You need to understand how much work your company is going to have to put in every time those files are delivered so that you can move them into print. The buyer in the transaction space cares about two things more than anything else: security and how fast you're going to get it into the mail stream. Transaction print is delivered into the mail stream, which means we are relying on the postal service and its delivery timeframes. 
    • Interestingly, for things like credit card statements and claims checks for insurance, the time that can elapse from the time they are cut off to the time it is in your mailbox is regulated.
    • The printer is constantly trying to balance how long it is going to take to print the job. Some of these jobs print for more than a day, and they are so large. Think about a Visa provider or a MasterCard provider. They can be really big jobs. As they are getting delivered into the mail stream, you are hoping that the USPS is running on time. If they are not, you might miss the delivery to the mailbox timeframe that you have guaranteed your customer, and you get to pay.
    • These contracts tend to be quite extensive and a little mercenary. Most of the people who buy print in the print space, or customer communication in general, whether it is delivered in print or delivered electronically, expect the provider to pick up any of the cost of being late.
    • [00:10:20] Ryan McAbee: One of the more unique aspects about transaction printing is all around the contractual things that you have to execute. It is not only that regulatory concern, but it is all about the timing and the Service Level Agreement, and the repercussions if you do not hit that.
    • That is unique because you do not really find that in the commercial world to the extent or to the penalty level. 
    • [00:10:38] Pat McGrew: Everybody wants their work on time. There is no doubt. It is regulated in this space, and you have to remember that a lot of transaction printers, if you were to go to the government and look at their business data, they do not even call themselves printers. They call themselves payment processors in many cases because they not only send the bills out but also enable the payments that come back. In the old days, when everybody was writing checks, there was a remittance slip on the bottom of your bill, and you wrote a check and put it in the envelope, and you mailed it back. A lot of that got mailed back to drop boxes that belonged to the printing companies. They did the sorting and got the checks into the accounts for their clients. Even today, with electronic payments, a lot of them have upgraded their skill set so that they can now take electronic payments on behalf of their clients as well. The printing piece is maybe a smaller piece, and this is for the bigger guys.
    • Remember, there is a class of transaction printer that we would call the small and medium size. They might be servicing things like professional engineering practices or professional doctor practices, or other kinds of professionals that do invoicing and billing on a regular basis. They do not want to do it from the photocopier or sitting behind the receptionist desk. They contract with companies to take all that data and to get those bills printed and into the stream. In those cases, they are worried about security, they are worried about turnaround, but they may not be as likely to ask for fines to be paid and rebates if things go out one day late.
    • The places where you worry about that are in credit card, banking, financial, retirement management, wealth management, and healthcare. For companies in those spaces, the buyers are experts at knowing what they have to demand in order to meet their requirements. 
    • Every one of the buyers that you work with in this space has the ability to ask for an audit at any time. By audit, what we mean is that either they or their appointed representative can show up at the print site and try to break in, try to get in, try to get past people, try to put their nose in places in the building that doesn't belong. Generally, they do a security audit to see how things are going or they can hire a service to do it.
    •  They do it, and they do it all the time. 
    • [00:12:39] Ryan McAbee: You definitely need to make sure you dot your i's and cross your t's, so to speak, right? 
    • [00:12:43] Pat McGrew: And that you are building that into your pricing. This is where an experienced salesperson in the transaction space knows these things. They know it in a way that maybe a novice might not.
    • They know what things the buyer is not telling them that they are going to be asking for down the road and just expect as part of the contract. You have to make sure that you are enumerating exactly what services you are offering in that contract and what security you are providing. Sometimes they want to know who your cyber insurance carrier is in addition to who your business insurance carrier is. That has to be a big thing, and it is very expensive insurance to carry. They may want to know your VDP capabilities and your variable data processing capabilities. Can you take the data and merge it on the way to the communication file, or do you need the print file provided to you already merged? 
    • Companies come in different flavors. What are your capabilities, and what are you offering in terms of pricing and attention to substrate options? It used to be in the transaction space, we did not worry about the substrate options too much. If it was white paper, we were all happy, and life was good. With the rise of inkjet printing devices, some of them are touchier than others about different kinds of substrates. What options we had started to make a difference. Today it makes a difference for a different reason - because we have supply chain difficulties, and we are probably going to have them for a little while to come. One of the things when you are making an offer to a customer in this space specifically, you want to make sure you understand their parameters around when you can switch the substrate that you're printing on and when they do not want you to. There may be a reason for one or the other. 
    • There are a lot of things that you can do to craft the offer, but again, in this space, the salesperson carries a lot of institutional knowledge, and they are the person that the production team and the business management rely on to keep an ear to the ground to know when trends are changing, and what kinds of security requirements might be changing. What kind of other expectations might be coming into the mix?
    • [00:14:30] Ryan McAbee: With this space, it's always done through a request for proposal or RFP process. It's all in how you respond to that, too. They are often asking you very specific questions, and they want to see how you either have that capability, how you answer the question, how you maybe even say that you do not, but you have a plan to get to that point.
    • [00:14:46] Pat McGrew: We have done RFP reviews for clients where we looked at their responses, and they were non-responsive. This is an area where it is usually the sales team leading the RFP response that will get delivered back to the customer. And it is imperative to read every question very carefully and to respond to every question.
    • Very often, the buyer has hired a service to craft that Request for Proposal or Request for Quote. It goes back to those people, and if you do not answer their questions, you get off the list pretty fast. The transaction space does not behave like any other space. It is one of those things that if this is the space you live in, learning as much about the industries you serve, the segments you serve, the kind of print you serve, and what the customer expectations are, is the best way to ensure that you will not get knocked off the bid lists. 
    • [00:15:38] Ryan McAbee: Obviously, understanding how to craft those responses for the RFP and making sure that you are actually answering. 
    • Thanks for sharing all the knowledge here in terms of selling strategies for transaction printers. We hope that you have enjoyed this overview and will join us here at a future episode at The Print University.

29- SIGN SHOPS

Sign shop salespeople must have an enhanced level of knowledge regarding material choices, inks, and printing technologies to ensure the best selections are made for the customer’s intended use.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another episode here at The Print University. This is Ryan McAbee at Pixel Dot Consulting, and we have Pat McGrew from the McGrewGroup. Pat, today we are talking about selling strategies for sign shops or wide-format printers. These are the folks that do all of the creative, fun stuff that we see as we walk through retail environments, go to sporting events, all that kind of stuff.
    • How does the selling process look different? 
    • [00:00:22] Pat McGrew: Sign shops, in a lot of ways, will profile a lot like an independent commercial printer. Sign shops, very often, are independent. They are single-location entities. Although there are sign shops with multiple locations, and there are sign shops that are franchises.
    • Selling the capabilities of wide-format equipment, in general, basically means you are selling things that are meant to be displayed. People are very sensitive to how it looks. How durable it is going to be; what their mounting options are going to be. 
    • The salesperson has to be part printer specialist and part mounting specialist. They have some additional technical expectations that are part of the conversation because most things that are printed on wide-format equipment, whether it is flatbed equipment or roll-fed equipment, whether it is rigid or it is on a roll - that is going to be mounted. 
    • [00:01:14] Ryan McAbee: There is a little bit of logistics involved here, too, right? 
    • [00:01:17] Pat McGrew: One of the things that sign shops often have - things that can differentiate a sign shop - is the varieties in mounting capabilities. That can be a real selling proposition - I can do what you need for your location… I have the ability to actually do the install. Very often, smaller sign shops might not have installers, but they might have a rotary of contract installers that they can recommend. Sometimes they do the contracting, sometimes they make recommendations to a customer and the customer has to manage that part themselves.
    • Installing can be as simple as - we have some grommets, and we are going to hang it on a hook. Not a big problem. It can also involve bucket trucks and all sorts of specialized equipment when you are trying to hang billboards or you are doing a building wrap, or something that is hanging off the side of a building. The design shops very often specialize in doing things like vehicle wraps - they are using that same wide-format equipment. They are printing on a specialist substrate that creates a vehicle wrap. That kind of installation is a very specialized skill.
    • The sales team members have to understand what kind of wide-format we are doing. Are we doing everything, or are we a specialist in just hard signs? Are we a specialist in very large pieces because we have a fleet of bucket trucks? Are we specializing in wayfinding signs? Are we specialists in real estate signs, or are we specialists in the feather signs that go in verges? We have eight or nine things we do, and we contract out for the rest. Understanding the box that you are in, what you want to be selling, and understanding the market you are trying to sell it into becomes really important. 
    • Again, the salesperson ends up being part printer, part engineer in order to have that conversation with the customer. 
    • [00:02:49] Ryan McAbee: It strikes me in this space, from a sales perspective, you really do need to know the materials and the purpose of those materials. Is it going to be better suited to outdoors versus indoors? Some of these products that wide-format printers and sign shops do are floor graphics, which is a whole different. thing because you want to make sure it has the appropriate coating, so people do not slip on it and cause accidents.
    • [00:03:07] Pat McGrew: Yet it is still durable enough to be walked on. Even signs that are going to be on walls. Is it going to be a frame around it? Are we laminating it to give it a little bit more durability? Are we printing it with UV inks so that it has a different level of durability? Are we printing with water-based inks that are not as durable, but we are going to laminate them? It is a big matrix of options, and your shop may not do all those options in-house, but you may have access to it. And so, the sales team members need to understand what your best profit margins are versus the things that reduce your profit margins if you have to send them out. They still have to find the right product for the customer that they are trying to sell to and help walk them through all of the production costs, as well as the mounting costs. And sometimes the shops take on responsibility for de-installing as well.
    • For things that are intended to be short-lived - event signage, for example - they will take on the responsibility of ensuring that all the material and all the signage are pulled down in an appropriate time frame after the event. Then moving it into recycling or disposing of it however it needs to be disposed of.
    • From a sales team perspective, you have to understand all the things you can sell. What services get dragged along with all the print that you might be selling? How to leverage that to become the go-to for the clients that you develop. 
    • [00:04:26] Ryan McAbee: Working with those clients in different types of businesses or organizations, you naturally start to develop a cadence or almost a sixth sense of what you can expand to cross-sell and bundle.
    • If someone comes in and they are looking for campaign signs, I know that I can offer those in multiple different sizes and configurations. If somebody is coming in for maybe an event, you can say you might want a teardrop. You also may want directional yard signs to direct people to the event and all this other sort of stuff.
    • [00:04:49] Pat McGrew: Absolutely. 
    • We have talked in other modules about adopting a selling methodology, and by selling methodology, we're typically talking about one of these programs that helps define all the elements of sale, all the steps of sale.
    • Sometimes they have names like Spin or Challenger, but there are a lot of them out there. The thing about those selling methodologies is that you do not have to have one, but if you do have one that you have adopted, it normalizes the process for you. It helps you keep yourself moving on a cadence through prospecting and engagement. All the steps that we saw in that first circle slide. Beyond that selling methodology, there are things that selling, and print, require.
    • It requires that you really understand the manufacturing technologies that are available to you. Especially when it comes to the sign / wide-format market. The kinds of things like vehicle wraps or building wraps or train wraps or truck wraps - they all have some very specific technical requirements. One of the things we always look at is not only what are all of my production capabilities, my mounting capabilities, and my display capabilities, but have I documented all of this? This is one of those spaces where the product is being delivered into a public environment. A publicly accessible environment.
    • It is a really good idea to be able to help the buyer understand their responsibilities, too. I have talked to salespeople in this space who have quick reference guides that they carry with them. “Hi, you say you want to buy a bunch of pull-up signs for use at an event, and they are going to be standing here and here. Let's talk a little bit about whether they can get knocked over.” They have these checklists about where the signs are going to go, where the display pieces are going to go, and if they might interact with the environment around them. What do we have to do to make sure that they cannot get knocked over or they cannot fall on somebody? There are a lot of OSHA kinds of things. There are occupational safety and health requirements around placing signs into public venues that the salesperson really needs to be able to communicate to their potential customers too. The buyer may not know that it is a concern.
    • A pull-up sign at an event that is in a tent on uneven ground is as likely to fall over as it is to stand. What do I have to do in terms of making sure as a customer? What do I need to know? 
    • Sample books are harder in this space. We talked about this a little bit in the wide-format space because signs can be small and very easy to show. It can be a Coroplast sign. It can also be building size, and you are probably not going to have that rolled up in your trunk or easily displayed. So having really great pictures of the work that you do and that you can do is a really great way to have different kinds of conversations with customers because they do not always know what they want.
    • They know that they need a sign or they need a display, but they do not really have ideas beyond that. Buyers of signs may be agency representatives who do this all the time and absolutely understand all the ins and outs, but just as easily, it might be a case where you are dealing with somebody who has never bought a sign before in their life. You have gotta be prepared for all of those. You need different stories that will work for all of those. 
    • [00:07:39] Ryan McAbee: Speaking of the stories, I find that sign shops, more than any other type of printer, take the opportunity to use their facility as a showroom. They usually will take their own products and put wall decor up, or they will do different examples of backlit signs and all these other kinds of examples. If someone does come in, they can show them that this is what it will look like. The other thing is that there are some technologies out there now that will do 3D renderings in context. If you want to see what a sign looks like at a bus stop, it will render that. 
    • [00:08:03] Pat McGrew: A lot of these products have come down in price now to where even a standalone sign shop can very often afford to get access to those kinds of programs that show the signs in situ. But big agencies typically have whole digital asset management systems that have the ability to show signs almost against a Google map with Google positioning to show where it goes. There are a lot of different variations in how you can sell and what tools are available for you to sell. The important thing is to figure out for your shop - what is going to work for you.
    • [00:08:31] Ryan McAbee: Circling back to the site prep conversation. I think that is very important in the sales process here for wide-format because if you are installing signs in an airport or installing signs in a sports stadium, you have those OSHA kinds of considerations. The other thing is that you do have to make sure that the actual client, the person that is purchasing the print, has done the steps that they require because it is not a good situation for either side if the installers get there and they physically cannot install the sign because of X, Y, and Z.
    • [00:08:56] Pat McGrew: There may be licenses required, and there may be... 
    • [00:08:58] Ryan McAbee: accessibility. They cannot get access to the facility. Whatever the stopping mechanism is. Often the installers, whether they are your own employees or through a third-party company, will document and take photographs after the installation is complete as a sign-off and approval step. The worst thing that can happen is that everything goes through. You get all the products printed. You work hard to do that, to meet the time turnaround, and then at the last mile, at the installation, you cannot go forward. I think that is a critical step here. 
    • [00:09:21] Pat McGrew: It is one of those weird facets where it very often requires licensing. It might require property building approval for the sign to be installed. If it is at an event, there may be very specific requirements around how things can be as installed at an event and a convention center. The buyer has a lot of responsibilities when it comes to signage. The kinds of responsibilities are a bit different because signs are hung in public places, or they might be internal to a building, like employee-facing signs. There are still requirements around them, and that is why it is incumbent on the salesperson to try and figure out if the buyer actually understands all of their responsibilities. If you are working with a sign agency, a marketing agency that does this all the time, it is a slightly different kind of conversation, but you still do not want to make assumptions.
    • You want to make sure that everybody who is going to be involved in this sign purchase or display purchase understands their responsibilities. That is why a lot of the sales guys I have met have these kinds of checklists in their back pockets. Even if they never expose it to the buyer, they are going through it while they are having the conversation to kind of test and see how they are. 
    • One of the things that we have not talked about much is selling to color requirements in signage. It is easy to think - how hard can it be if it is going on a giant billboard? Buyers of signs are just as concerned about color - logo colors and scheme colors that match campaigns - as anybody who is buying commercial print or buying other kinds of print products.
    • It is a conversation you have to have. You have to get the buyer to tell you how concerned they are about colors. This is a conversation that leads to - does it need to be printed using UV inks? Does it need to be colorfast? Does it need to be capable of being exposed to sunlight for hours and hours a day? Is it for indoor use only? By the way, when you do things indoors, fluorescent lights impact the color that people see, so we need to be talking about that. Buyers do not always think about that in terms of where designs will be hung and how colors will be interpreted; the salesperson needs to expose them so that they have the best experience.
    • The worst thing is to go through the whole process and have the sign hung and have the customer show up and go, “That is not the color I wanted. That is not my logo color.” You have to tear it down and do it all again because the lighting was not accounted for: fluorescent lights versus daylight.
    • This all does make a difference. The buyers do not always understand all the mounting requirements, even professionals. If you are going into a new venue you have never been to before, and you are going into a new location, you are doing something different. 
    • New mounting styles come out all the time. 30 years ago, we never talked about pull-up signs, and we did not talk about a lot of the different things that we can now do with rigid signs. A lot of that stuff has changed. Substrates have changed color capabilities, lamination capabilities, and structural things have changed.
    • Making sure that the buyer actually understands what they are asking for and that they are asking for the best thing for what they are trying to do - again, the role of the salesperson is to help the buyer make the best choice, and sometimes it's against their will. 
    • [00:12:16] Ryan McAbee: Understanding the life cycle of the print is important, too. It is not only the fact that you need to have the color reproduced accurately, but it is also that you want it to sustain and have that same look from the time it is first installed to the time it is decommissioned or taken down.
    • That factors into your material choices, your finishing choices, where it is going to be positioned, and all of these kinds of things that the salesperson will help the buyer walk through and understand, especially if they do not really have a deep understanding of the requirements there. 
    •  What are the best practices here in terms of crafting the offer and selling signs?
    • [00:12:45] Pat McGrew: It is always important to know what you do that is unique. You offer installation services or mounting services. You can print on unusual substrates. That is always a great thing to have in your back pocket. The things that other people in your market cannot do or that you do better or at a better price. Those things are really important.
    • The other thing is to understand who is going to be responsible for what pieces of this adventure you are embarking on together. As the print company, you are responsible for the printing, but how much of the rest of it are you responsible for, and how much is the customer going to be responsible for?
    • Generally, knowing your menu of costs depending on who is doing what, sometimes you have to craft a couple of offers to figure out what the buyer really wants. One where you do everything up to and including the removal of the sign at the end of its life. And somewhere, it is an a la carte menu where we are going to print it, we are going to add the mounting pieces to it, but your team is going to do all the different pieces that you need to do. 
    • It is a little bit of art, a little bit of engineering, and being able to help the buyer understand what they're paying for and what they're responsible for.
    • Is this going into a public location? Making sure we know who is responsible for getting licenses and building waivers, and installation waivers. If the printing company is going to do that, it is going to have a cost associated with it. You do not do it for free. If the customer says they are going to do it and then they do not do it - who has responsibility? Where is the money going to change hands to make sure we can get it done? 
    • Making offers that you think the buyer can understand is important. Depending on what your assessment of your buyer is, you will know how deep you are going to need to make your explanations in the offer that you make to them.
    • Almost never is a signed contract, a line item contract. There are almost always descriptive explanations for everything that is being done because there are so many parties involved in hanging a sign in public. 
    • [00:14:34] Ryan McAbee: You are trying to guide them as the salesperson to the best solution for whatever their needs are, which is what any sales process is.
    • There are a lot more moving parts to the wide-format space than probably most of the other types of printing. Maybe transaction printing kind of rivals it?
    • [00:14:47] Pat McGrew: It is very contractual in transaction. In transaction, the worst thing that happens is that you send the wrong bill to the wrong person -  that has legal consequences and fine consequences. But here in the sign space, if something is not mounted correctly, it is not spec’d correctly, it can be dangerous. That is why selling signs is an art and a science and an engineering adventure, right? You have to make sure that the sign is going to be appropriate for the space where it is going to be used and that no one is going to get hurt in the process.
    • That might seem easy, but it actually is not. 
    • [00:15:19] Ryan McAbee: That is a great place to end this particular episode. Thank you for joining us today, and we hope to see you here at a future episode at The Print University.

30- FRANCHISE PRINTERS

This discussion focuses on the franchisor/franchisee relationship and how that impacts the support and training to find customers and sell a range of solutions.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another edition here at The Print University. This is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting, and we have Pat McGrew from the McGrewGroup. Pat, today we are talking about selling strategies inside a unique space in the printing industry. It is franchise printers, and what do we really mean when we say franchise printer?
    • [00:00:18] Pat McGrew: It is an interesting world: a company that is a printing company that chooses to align itself with a master organization that provides tools to them, might provide advertising for them, and gives them a lot of guidance about how to operate and grow their business. So there are a lot of really well-known ones.
    • You might look at AlphaGraphics or Sir Speedy. There are all sorts of them all over the place that you might see in a shopping mall or on a commercial street. You might just find them on the web. Typically these organizations have a headquarters operation that worries about doing all the marketing for their brand, then being accountable to the members of their franchise by providing educational opportunities to them, helping them do deals to buy equipment, helping them get discounts, to buy software that they might need, and sometimes even help them with getting discounts on paper and other substrates, ink, and toner. All the things that they might be working with. You are an independent printing company, but you are in a relationship with a family of other printing companies. And one of the other distinguishing factors is that you will be paying monthly fees to that franchise parent organization.
    • So an independent printer doing it all on their own. They spend the money. They keep the profit. That is how they operate. In a franchise operation, you are selling, you are making money, but there is this monthly fee that goes back. What you are getting in return is access to national, sometimes international advertising. You are getting access often to something that looks like a print Management Information System that allows you to take orders and fulfill orders and manage your bookkeeping. You are getting access to a vendor community and a community of other printers like you to trade ideas. 
    • Another kind of interesting selling feature of franchises is that they can help do distributed printing. An organization might need to do a roadshow series of events in 20 cities. If they contract with the franchise parent company, the parent company can place that work with the franchise companies, the franchise members in each of those cities. Yet it looks as though it was all produced by one organization, which is sometimes an advantage. 
    • There is not any one kind of printing. Members can be wide-format specialists, book specialists, booklet specialists, and commercial specialists. They might have offset equipment, flexo equipment. They might have digital equipment, wide-format, grand format. They might have all sorts of interesting specializations and capabilities.
    • The challenge is if you are a salesperson working for one of these operations, you have the ability to work not only within the confines of what your four walls can produce, but you can sell what anybody in the network can. 
    • [00:02:56] Ryan McAbee: There are a couple of things that stand out for me for franchises. Some of these also have international operations. They cross borders, which could be advantageous for that distributed print model if they are capable of doing that. The other thing that strikes me is part of the franchise fees that you do pay. You get all that great stuff that you ran through, Pat.
    • But the other value-add that is often overlooked is that they give you a manual or a playbook for your business processes and your manufacturing processes. Many people that come into these franchise operations may not have a background in printing at all or maybe not a background in manufacturing. 
    • [00:03:24] Pat McGrew: It is very often that a family decides to get into the printing business. They buy a printing franchise to fast path their way into it.
    • [00:03:30] Ryan McAbee: From the sales side, many have a retail presence, meaning they're on a high street, a main street, or in a retail shopping strip mall. Some of the selling happens at the counter, with an inside salesperson, but in many cases, they have some kind of outside sales member that tries to generate business very much like a commercial printer.
    • [00:03:48] Pat McGrew: They do. Very often, they are family-owned. If you check, you will find the majority are either family-owned or group-of-friends-owned. Someone in that group takes the sales lead; they vote and decide that one person is more inclined to it than another. Someone has more contacts than other people in the group do. The management will find its level. Who is good at sales, who is good at the counter, who is good at managing production and managing all the business aspects?
    • Sales is a little bit interesting because you want to make sure that you are working within the confines of the franchise rules and policies. They do have rules and policies that you need to be familiar with, but it also gives you this wide world that you can go out and sell into.
    • The person who gets targeted is the sales lead, may have no previous selling experience at all, or they may have a lot of sales experience from some other industry, maybe even in the printing industry. If the salesperson is one of those really gregarious, friendly people who like to talk, management and franchise owners have told me over the years that sometimes they have to reel them in. The idea is to sell the printing services, not to sit and talk about somebody's life history.
    • Most of the franchises operate sales training courses. Really good sales training courses. They put a lot of time and effort into them. The franchisees who have gone through those courses say that they are valuable because it helps reel them in. It helps them draw the box around how to engage - how not to become somebody's best friend. It is not that it is bad; it is just that it does not sell things. 
    • [00:05:13] Ryan McAbee: They are usually based on one of the sales methodologies. 
    • [00:05:15] Pat McGrew: They are often hybrids of several. They all have their own approach to them. They are typically online courses that are either taught live online, or they are on video. I always tell franchise people to take advantage of those courses because they are going to help them understand what this franchise organization knows, and how they work. They are going to teach you what the best practices are that successful franchisees are doing today that you can do to make money and grow your business. You are doing all the same things that a commercial shop or a wide-format shop, or any kind of privately held shop is doing, but you are doing it with a bit of a safety net under you because the franchise is there to help you. If they can train you to be really good at sales, that benefits them as well as you. 
    • [00:05:56] Ryan McAbee: The parent company can look across all of the franchisees and pick out those best practices, the best in class, and model all the training and material and support around what they know works. And that is another value-add there.
    • [00:06:08] Pat McGrew: They can help catch you too. What I said about the safety net is really important. Franchises are great for people who have never owned a business before. But there are pluses and minuses there. If you have never owned a business before, there are a lot of really easy mistakes to make.
    • One of the things about the franchise is that they are watching all their franchisees. If they start to see things that do not look quite right: the way the orders are coming in, the cadence that the orders are coming in, the amount of money that is being processed through the system, they can reach out and sometimes they will offer to send a trainer on-site to help.
    • [00:06:39] Ryan McAbee: These are often micro-businesses, so you are talking about a few people that are in them in their entirety. We talked about, in the in-plant selling strategy course where there is usually no one person that does a single function. They are wearing many hats. 
    • The struggle for a lot of franchisees is that the lead person who wanted to get into the business, who is kind of the CEO, they are not only trying to manage and grow the business, they are trying to do sales, they are trying to do operations. Having that framework from the franchisor to say, “If you are in this role, you need to delegate these other tasks. These are the things you need to focus on.” I think that, again, provides some value there from the sales side. 
    • [00:07:12] Pat McGrew: It absolutely does. Selling in a franchise -  it is a little bit different. We will come back to the safety net idea. They have a lot of tools. They will help you build your website. Very often, there are some requirements about the franchise logo, but they will offer you several templates that you can pick from.
    • They know that their franchise members do not all do the same things, so they have different variations of their templates that let you feature the fact that you do wide-format or maybe embroidery on t-shirts or corporate manuals. Maybe you are really good at doing manual production or booklet production. They have tools that you can leverage, and they are absolutely worth leveraging. The other thing is that you can crawl, walk, and run inside a franchise environment. You can start out just doing trifold brochures on a light production piece of equipment, then over time, you might learn that in your market, there is nobody doing t-shirts. There is nobody doing wide-format signs. You can bring that kind of equipment in with the help of your franchise. They can help you set up and retool your website as you grow. 
    • Having that safety net is a really great thing for franchises. It allows a lot of organizations to become more successful faster and grow faster. At the same time, franchises tend to be small operations; 5, 10, 8, 20 people, but some franchise operations have 20 sites owned by the same franchisee. They are actually multimillion-dollar corporations.
    • It is still incumbent on everyone to understand what the production capabilities are, what I can do in-house, what I can get access to through a network, and what things we want to specialize in as a franchise. I have worked with franchises that desperately want to specialize in promotional things like cups, mugs, and key chains. They go down a quite different path than a franchise that wants to specialize in doing corporate communication pieces, brochures, small manuals, or employment packages. 
    • You have to understand what you want to specialize in and then how you are going to accomplish those. I always say to gather your relevant samples and make sure that you can show what you can do. Those sample pictures of what you can do should be on your website. I think that is a really important thing because not all of the franchise members are doing the same thing. You want people to know what it is that you can do and developing that story is a place where the franchise team can help you. 
    • [00:09:18] Ryan McAbee: Since most of these are selling to their local market, they are not typically selling across the country. I think part of the sales process is the fact that you need to identify large print users or entities within your community. There are always those businesses in your local community that are heavy users of it. So whether it is some kind of medical complex or another big user of print, they are around.
    • [00:09:36] Pat McGrew: The professional, legal practices, professional engineering practices, training schools - think about vocational-technical training schools. Also, the kind of hobbyist academies. The gymnastics academies, the soccer academies, and the football academies all need material as well, and it is usually in constant updates. It is the kind of thing that they need on a regular cadence.
    • Again the franchise organizations know all this. They are a really great resource for telling you where to look for opportunities. They are not going to go make the sale for you, but they are going to give you some really great ideas of where you can go meet with someone.
    • One of the things that often works very well, especially for new franchises, is to do their own direct mail campaign. It might be what we have called EDDM, Every Door Direct Mail. It is a service of the US Postal Service that lets you send out unaddressed mail into a community. If you know there is this geographic box that you can draw, that is where you can use and practice doing direct mail for yourself and start to build a rotary of people you can contact who might need print from you.
    • Again, it is really important if you are going to go out and sell into associations, soccer teams, or gymnastics academies, to take a little time to learn who those people are. Go look at their websites. Learn how they style themselves before you go talk to them. The phrase that drives most buyers insane is when a print salesperson turns up at their doorstep and says, “Tell me a little bit about what you do. Tell me a little about your business.” The assumption is you should know if you got there. Take some time to do that. This is stuff that the franchise training modules typically are very good at pointing out.
    • [00:11:12] Ryan McAbee: All very good points. Getting to the end here, what does the offer look like from the franchisee approach versus probably the next closest comparison of a smaller commercial printer? Is it any different?
    • [00:11:20] Pat McGrew: I would say it is very similar, but in some ways, it is more personal. Again the vast majority of the franchises are smaller operations. They are storefront operations, or they are in an industrial complex where there is not a walk-up, but it is still operated by a small number of people. Those relationships tend to be one-on-one, and very personal. The nature of the conversations tends to grow over time. They are hard to get started, but once you have them, they tend to grow over time. A lot of times, the relationships that you develop cause your business to grow in different ways.
    • A commercial printer has certain types of equipment, and they are watching markets, and they are making changes. They are serving a pretty broad community. A franchise might start out serving a very narrow community in order to get started and develop very deep relationships in that narrow community, and only expand over time as they feel comfortable or as they get introduced into new markets. Sometimes it is by reference, by somebody that they are doing work with. Franchise operators find that word-of-mouth is one of the biggest ways that they get new business. I have interviewed a number of franchisees this year, and one of the things that they all say is that while their websites are important and their marketing is important, what really grows their business is when customers recommend them to other potential customers. That is where very deep relationships get defined. The ability to recognize trends in the market that they are serving. Their trends are going to tend to be microtrends because they are serving micro-communities.
    • Just because everybody across the US is on TikTok does not mean that a franchise needs to be on TikTok because their community may not even know what TikTok is. They may just know that these guys will do manuals for me when I need them. They will do brochures or wayfinding signs, or event signs for me when I need them done. I will recommend them to other organizations.
    • Very often, you get parents going to soccer games. They see all the stuff that is printed - the feather signs, the wayfinding signs, the programs that might go along with an event, and they ask, “Hey, I need that for my other organization. My other kid is doing hockey, and we need that stuff, too. Where do we go get it?” They'll get pointed back.
    • Franchises in most cities are really very good at reaching out into those kinds of communities and expanding their reach that way. 
    • [00:13:26] Ryan McAbee: They are usually ingrained in the community. They are part of the local business network and all of that sort of thing. I think the thing that was interesting there is the narrow focusing. A franchise printer can notice things like a new 400-home community coming in and then tell the gymnastics shop to do EDDM in this community because 400 families might use your services. 
    • [00:13:42] Pat McGrew: That is the kind of thing that a franchise can really go after because they can keep their eye on those things. Being part of a franchise brings you your national team, and your franchise headquarters team is always watching the trends as well. They are going to be in constant communication with you about things they see working in other communities. That is something that an independent commercial printer would not have access to. 
    • [00:14:03] Ryan McAbee: Or they would have to do it on their own in some way.
    • [00:14:04] Pat McGrew: It is hard to get a national view when you are trying to serve a local community.
    • [00:14:08] Ryan McAbee: Very good. I hope you have learned a little bit here about how the franchise model works and how the selling strategies there are a little bit different. You do have the safety net aspect that you can lean on the franchisor to help you through these processes and growing the business.
    • Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Print University, and we hope to see you.

63- SELLING PRINT ONLINE

Most printers agree that selling print online through web-to-print systems is important. This episode covers important tips on getting the system launched, attracting customers, and best practices with search engine optimization (SEO).

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hey, I'm Pat McGrew. This is Ryan McAbee. We are The Print University, and today we want to talk to you about the benefits of selling print online. To be honest, Ryan, this is an area that we've actually talked about in some other episodes because we've talked about some of the technologies involved, like web-to-print and setting up digital portals.
    •  We've also talked about selling into specific industry verticals, but we haven't really focused on the difference between selling online and showing up at someone's office and, with a sample case and, trying to show them all the things that you can do. What are the real benefits for someone to go online and sell?
    • [00:00:44] Ryan McAbee: There are many benefits. We have to separate them between what are the benefits for your prospect or your customer or client that you may already be working with, and also what are the benefits for you from an operational perspective as the printer. 
    • If you think about it from the customer's per perspective, and I would often challenge you to give more consideration and time to this aspect than even the benefit for you. Just for the simple reason that if you cannot get your customers to use the solution, in the end, it's not going to have any benefit for you no matter what. Focus on the customer first. What are the benefits for them? It really improves the interaction or it can improve the interaction. It certainly lessens the burden of the interaction from the print shop perspective, but improve customer experience. They can self-service it at any point in the day that they want to. It's the 24, 7, 365, way of thinking, so it's accessible whenever they want to do it.
    • They can also go through and make the choices and selections that you've given them in terms of the product catalog. If it's in a B2B situation, they can also be restricted in terms of what they can and cannot do based on brand guidelines or design guidelines that you've set up in your templates for them. There's all that kind of ease of user experience there. Frankly, if you ask most people that are doing the print buying these days, they might prefer this approach versus a very manual intensive one where I have to talk to the salesperson or I have to make a phone call, or I have to do all these other kind of processes that take more time for the customer to execute on versus going to a website, putting a product, customizing product and then checking out. Those are definitely some of the benefits for the customer side. 
    • For the printer side, Pat, it's really around optimization and automation. It's the fact that you can repurpose your labor hours from what you probably have been doing manually from the sales person perspective, from your customer support representatives and from your estimators, because those are the three people that usually get tied up in this onboarding. The thing often overlooked is that when you're forced to think about what products you're putting and what options you're giving for those products in the storefront, it forces you to standardize. Instead of saying, I'm going to print the world, you say, what am I really good at? What can I do well, what can I do profitably. What do I do all day long that takes a lot of touch points? Let's put that stuff in the storefront and that will free up labor hours and give us better cost of good sold than all of our metrics in terms of probability.
    • [00:03:00] Pat McGrew: Of the things that always strikes me about bringing these kinds of online print selling solutions into a print shop is that there are always going to be those people in the organization who are going to say wait a minute, " I'm going to have to change what I do." You're changing what I can sell. You're taking salespeople are notorious for saying wait a minute. You're taking options away from me. Actually, that's not the intent at all. The intent is to route everything that is standard through a single platform that standardizes all the touchpoints, minimize. The touchpoints makes the CSRs job easier, and frankly makes the salesperson's job easier so that they can focus on those special projects, right?
    • The ones that are going to take more time, might take more creativity to estimate and to plan for, but might have more value associated with them, so higher profit margins. You want to route everything that you can do routinely, as you said, through these platforms, but the platform gives you some options. You are not required when you put an online print selling program into action to expose it to every consumer in the marketplace. Very often these solutions are done solely for the customers that you are already servicing. You're just making it easier for them to order from you. You're allowing them to have some confidence in what they order because you're making it so easy by standardizing.
    • If you choose to expose to the general public in a business-to-consumer environment that's fine too, but you aren't required to do that. I think that's one thing that scares some printers. They feel like web-to-print always means opening up to the entire world, and not everybody wants to do that.
    • [00:04:49] Ryan McAbee: That's true. It's at your discretion. The aspect that you were walking through really is labeled business-to-business or B2B for short. You're creating these portals and this online experience basically for the types of businesses you already work with and can engage with. It's just giving them a different way to purchase a different experience on their end, and it's probably going to make it easier. They're just as constrained for time and resources as you probably are. Why make them go through more hoops and hurdles to just order the print unless it is something where they truly need your expertise. They want to engage you because it is something that they're trying that's new and different for them. That's more the consultative selling approach. That's where this time is going to be freed up from that you can repurpose to those kind of activities.
    • The other thing that you mentioned was if you open it up to the general public or consumers. It's the business-to-consumer model b2c. The way you approach these is completely different. When you're going out to the general consumer population you have to really be good at your search engine optimization. You have to be found, right? Yeah. We have well established and well entrenched online printers as we usually label them, that have been doing this for decades at this point. 
    • [00:05:54] Pat McGrew: Oh, yeah. Yeah. 
    • [00:05:54] Ryan McAbee: You also have to think about how am I going to scale and support tens of thousands of potential customers versus that B2B model. I'm probably used to working with a lot fewer or fewer people to have to support. It's a whole different kind of support model that goes on between these two. 
    • The other distinction points, if it's a consumer, you're going to have lower order quantities. You may be producing a book of one, like a photo book, or you may be producing 500 copies of a brochure. You're not probably doing quantities of tens of thousands in a B2C kind of approach. What other distinctions do you see between the two models? 
    • [00:06:26] Pat McGrew: Very often when we start thinking about a business-to-business model, we're going to be talking about something that may be integrated into your customer's environment as well. Business-to-business has huge benefits because most of your customers welcome the idea of reducing the number of times they have to talk to you about a specific project. They love the idea of being able to integrate with an API or a software development kit into their order and procurement systems so they can easily do business with you.
    • I always have had the sense that clients that I've worked with, who've been engaged on the brand or the print buyer side, always feel like they're getting the best deal when they use a B2B web-to-print system and online buying system because it's all just automatic. They're not wasting all of the employees times going back and forth and waiting for phone calls and waiting for emails and waiting for estimates and quotes. The more you can standardize in those systems, the more they appreciate it. It also allows you to create different styles of portals for each one of your customers, especially if you're a general commercial printer doing everything from posters and billboards to statement printing and direct mail and wayfinding signs. You may be doing everything for your customer. You may be doing books for some. You don't need the same portal for all of them. 
    • The idea of being able to lock down on behalf of your customer what they can buy, it's a conversation between your sales lead for that customer and the customer's procurement lead. Once they agree on what product should be available to all of the employees who they want to empower to buy, that makes it a whole lot easier for you as well. Then you don't have your CSR sitting there with, a bunch of cheat sheets. This customer only these titles are allowed to buy these products, but these titles are allowed to buy these other products, right? When it's all codified in the system, everybody gets time back in their day. Yeah. 
    • [00:08:29] Ryan McAbee: If your clientele is kind of a franchise model, for lack of better word, it's just impossible to keep track of all that level of detail without it taking a tremendous amount of time and leading to probably a lot of risk for errors too in that process versus having some kind of standard approach with a custom storefront that they have.
    • Let's talk a little bit about tips for the storefront design. Printers that we've worked with spend so much time worrying about the storefront, getting it launched that they get paralysis through analysis. They spend too much time thinking on it instead of just launching and then iterating quickly based on the customer feedback.
    • Simplify the number of products and options that you offer. We're not trying to replicate everything that you possibly can do as a printer. 
    •  You want to focus on 20% of applications or products you sell that generate 80% of the volume of your orders.
    • If you can do that, you're going to free up so much time to focus on the other things where you can add value. What's your kind of thought on that kind of catalog approach? 
    • [00:09:30] Pat McGrew: Absolutely a catalog approach. Does a couple of things. One, it forces you to actually examine what you are selling and understanding what you're selling the most of.
    • When we talk about assessments, we talk about this all the time. Understanding what you are actually selling to whom you are selling it, and if you're making any money on it? That should inform what you expose on an online selling platform because you don't want to expose products that you print that you're not making money on. It's tempting to do so if there are things that look simple. But because of commodity pricing in your marketplace, you have to price it so low, you're really not making money. Don't put that on your web-to-print environment, in your online selling environment. You want to simplify the options, which means you have to assess your actual product catalog and your capabilities. It's something that needs constant adjustment, Ryan. It's not a one and done because what you may discover is maybe you do a special project for a client and it turns out it was really pretty profitable and it actually wasn't that hard to do. Maybe that then gets added into your online catalog of things that you can do.
    • Maybe you bring in a new piece of equipment. You've got this really cool new flexo label machine that just came in the door. Oh my gosh, it has sped everything up. It's got this amazing front end. It's got amazing usability. The operators love it. It never goes down. Maybe you want to add the capabilities of that new device into your product catalog.
    • It's worth putting on the calendar that at least once every three or four months, you want to be taking a look at what's in that catalog and how it relates to what you do today, and whether all those jobs are still profitable. 
    • [00:11:19] Ryan McAbee: When it comes to selling online and these type of systems it's, you need to be consistent, persistent, and repetitive. It's something that never ends or never stops in terms of tweaking what you're offering, how you're actually delivering it, and so forth. Tip number two, I think is all about the customer. You want to remove the barriers to them getting to an order b eing placed. Whether you're just calling it a checkout procedure from a B2C where they're putting in a credit card or they've gone through and they're okay with the pricing. You just want to focus on streamlining that checkout process. 
    • The other thing that I think is prolific still in our industry is number three. We love to talk like a printer and think that everybody else understands what we're talking about.
    •  Okay, you definitely don't want to do that in a business-to-consumer environment. Absolutely. But that's still true in the B2B environment because we assume that the print buyer knows what they're doing. There's been such turnover that you're putting yourself at risk by thinking that we have someone who is indoctrinated in how things actually work in the print world as a corporate print buyer. 
    • My classic example, and you can go back and look at our paper 1 0 1, episode two, is about paper. Do people really understand what 180 GSM is versus more generic things like this is the thicker one than the base level. You want to give them enough descriptive language without being too technical so that they don't understand it. What's your takeaway on this because I still see this on every web print site that's out there. 
    • [00:12:45] Pat McGrew: One of the other areas where printer speak really crawls in is finishing. How do I want this piece delivered to me? What do I want it to look like when it's done? And. It is so easy to just stick into the web-to-print site, what the machines call things... the kinds of folds and the perforations and cuts and sizing. 
    •  You could just say, oh, well we do B1 printing.
    • [00:13:10] Ryan McAbee: What's that? 
    • [00:13:12] Pat McGrew: That's nice. Is that different from B2 or is A1 better than B2? Should I have A1 instead? And if you don't understand that those relate to paper sizes, then you could make some really poor decisions about what you're trying to order.
    • Different kinds of fold. Different kinds of bindings. Think about something like a short run magazine versus a small booklet. GBC binding? You know what that is? 
    • [00:13:42] Ryan McAbee: That's actually a company name. That's like saying Coca-Cola instead of soda. We get into that kind of vernacular thing too. I think what you're getting to is really our tip number four. Provide hints and tips and visual aids. If you're going to call something B1 or you're going to call something a gate folder; you're going to say, GBC binding, give a visual example or even a video clip of what these things actually are so that there's no mystery and confusion as to what I'm trying to order as the end buyer. 
    • [00:14:09] Pat McGrew: Help your customers understand what they need to provide in order for you to be successful producing that piece of work for them. 
    • [00:14:15] Ryan McAbee: That's right. You often see a lot of design templates. That's one thing we do see commonly that's a good practice. They give setups within InDesign or whatever the creative applications you're using. 
    • I think this is a newer thing and newer is relative term here, that came across because the big e-commerce sites like Amazon were doing it. It eventually trickled down to our web-to-print systems. If they have something in the cart, suggest other items to cross sell. If they chose a business card as an example, maybe upsell them to the nice paper that has the color strip in the middle. 
    • [00:14:43] Pat McGrew: Yup, the color edge.
    • [00:14:45] Ryan McAbee: Foiling or something to that effect.
    • [00:14:48] Pat McGrew: Or if you also do promotional items, the business card holder. The business card wallet. The stand for trade shows, things like that. The same thing with counter cards for retail environments, selling the stand that goes along with it that's also branded. If you have those capabilities, don't forget to upsell and cross-sell those capabilities. 
    • [00:15:08] Ryan McAbee: This gets a little bit more into how are we going to get people aware that we exist? Think about it in your everyday life, if you want to find out something, you're probably pulling up your, the app in your phone, or you're going to a website and you're using a search engine to help you locate that thing. Google is obviously a dominant player in this space.
    •  When you're creating this site search engines like fresh content. If you have a block component to your site that you're putting articles on every month about print, or what you're promoting, or something local in your community, as long as you use the right keywords, the search engine will start to rank you higher in the results list on search phrases that the end user puts in. 
    • The other thing that helps is to claim your business on Google, if you have not done that already. I think most of you probably have at this point, but don't forget that you can add content in there as well. You can absolutely put your link to your storefront. If somebody's even pulling up with Google Maps, they can click to your storefront. There's also other content you can put like your help guides right in that Google business listing. 
    • When you sit down to write any content, and this even goes to the descriptions of your products and everything that's going to be in the storefront itself, think of the keywords of that people would associate with and how they search for that.
    • In a B2B environment, which most of you're probably going to be in, think of what is referred to as a long tail of search, right? You're probably not going to be a top page result for online printing or poster printing. Those very generic terms. But if I say find a printer near me that prints posters it will know where I'm located doing this search and you might come up because of that. 
    • Also, they might search for poster printing in Grand Rapids. They'll get to the city level, and that may be something you will then rank higher in. Think about the keywords that you want to associate with geographically, product set wise. Look at the keyword search tools to know how people are searching and what phrases they're looking at. We're going to give you a couple examples of that on the next slide and formulate your keyword optimization list. 
    • The other two things really go to building a good site these days. You want to optimize your images so that you can reduce the amount of time it takes for that page to load. We've all been there. I think the statistics I saw on this were pretty remarkable. It was seconds. If your your site does not load within a few seconds, the abandon rate for people just going onto the next is very high. 
    • [00:17:25] Pat McGrew: Back when I was living on mainframes, we used to require our vendors to strive for sub-second response time whenever you hit the enter key. Then over the years, as networks be, and bandwidth became more clogged, it got to the point where we got used to waiting for a page to load. Nobody's got time for that now. Nobody is going to sit and wait. If you take more than two and a half, three seconds to paint a screen to provide valuable content it's not going to bode well for you.
    • The other thing that hurts is if you don't have a mobile friendly website. I still go to websites all the time that when I try to bring them up on my phone, I can only see the top left corner of a big webpage. They want me to scroll over and down and left and right, and I'm not going to do that. I'm going to leave and head for a site that actually can size or regenerate the information for me in an appropriate format for my phone or my iPad versus my bigger screens. 
    • [00:18:24] Ryan McAbee: Fortunately with the advent of HTML5 that's become less and less of an issue. Most systems that you would be looking at and probably any of the content management systems that you built your generic website on, they probably are already able to dynamically scale. It's something worth checking on and the testing component too. You need to check these things out role play as the end user who's going to access your site. Yeah. 
    • The last thing goes along with the keyword aspect. Make good page titles. Think about how that fits into the keywords that people were searching for and also good language.
    • [00:18:54] Pat McGrew: First create page titles and just create page titles. Here's how you can think of it. When you do a Google search, what it's doing is it's looking for a number of different characteristics before it will put your website into the search. It is looking for a page title, but you can often tell when somebody has paid to have their search rankings increased, but they haven't actually done the maintenance or the good data hygiene on their web code. It'll come up, heading one or your page title here. My favorite is when it's somebody else's website entirely. You can tell they duplicated code, but they never actually updated any of the headers in the top of the HTML, so it's not even saying the right things when it comes up. 
    • These are all things that your web developer, whether they're in-house or they're someone that you contract with, you need to be asking them about because they should know. I'm sure they do know, but will they forget on your site? Make sure the tags are all filled out at the for the header information, but also make sure the spelling is correct in those tags. Nobody's going to find you if your company name is spelled wrong in the meta tag that's in the header for the web page.
    • It is one of those things I see happen all the time. The other thing is to make sure that you are having your web developers fill out all the keywords to make sure that it is relevant for your site. You don't want keywords in there that say flexography and gravure if you don't do those things. Those are all really important things to look at when you're building your site. 
    • [00:20:35] Ryan McAbee: These are all general guidelines. You want to have those best practices in-house, but also make sure whoever you're contracting to do any work is also following those guidelines.
    • Here's some general resources. You can use the QR code and scan on the left. That'll take you to how to claim your business on Google. If you have not done that already.
    • On the right, you can scan the code for HubSpot is a great marketing automation tool for generally smaller businesses. They have a good ultimate guide to search engine optimization that you can find using that code.
    • Then at the bottom here, there's just some links you can type in to your web browser or you can search for these terms in your fa favorite search engine. These are a couple keyword tools that you can go in and start typing phrases and it'll give you suggestions and start the creative process flowing to identify what words you should focus on.
    •  We have the common issue or challenge of getting a storefront stood up, from a technical side, from getting the products put in and all the options. But then the biggest struggle that we see in the industry is, okay, you've built it but they won't come. This isn't the Field of Dreams movie. You've got to put the work in to get your customers or your prospects to use the solution. What are some best practices that we see here? 
    • [00:21:41] Pat McGrew: Tell people that you have these options, right? Printers are notoriously bad about not using print to communicate. Consider a direct mail campaign to your customers, your existing customers, to lapsed customer. In the us we have USPS, we have Every Door Direct Mail. Canada Post has a similar program. In the UK you can do it in Australia, you can do this with most of the national posts where they have a program in place to help you do a campaign to specific addresses. You don't have to know who lives there, what businesses there. They help you build the program so that you get into the right kinds of places based on postal codes and zip codes. Consider direct mail. It is one of those things that works amazingly well and it's again, not a one and done solution.
    • Direct mail is best paired with a really great website and social media program, and it's best when it's repeated, at least on a quarterly cadence through the year to continue to keep yourself visible in front of your clients. 
    • If you get past direct mail and you say what else can I do? Never forget that getting embedded in your customer's process is an excellent way to help grow your online relationship with them. Your sales team might need to reach out to their procurement departments to have a conversation about getting you closer linked. To find out if they're interested in that level of interaction. If they're interested in an API between their procurement system and your web-to-print system. That is the best way because that allows you to expose a catalog, lock it down by job title, make it just so easy for them to do business with you. There's no reason for them to look anywhere else for the work that they need.
    • [00:23:37] Ryan McAbee: That could even be with other departments, like marketing departments. I think a simple example, just to visualize this for people, is there's a technical thing called single sign-on. That basically means that in your customer's business, they have the list of who their users are. First name, last name, their technical role, telephone number, all this kind of details are usually known in that kind of system. You can create the link between their system and yours for a single sign-on, so it's seamless for them to get to your site. What's advantageous about most of these web-to-print systems now is they can take that information and actually automate some of the very simple products like business card. Where you don't even have to design anything or type anything. You could often pull that information down just from the integration that you've done with the customer. That's an example of how you embed into their process to make it much easier for them. It can get way more sophisticated from the marketing branding templates that we've been talking about if you're in a B2B environment and so on. The more you can engrain yourself into how they work, the stickier this relationship and this solution is going to become. 
    • [00:24:40] Pat McGrew: Absolutely! If you are a printer who has not spent some time investigating the in-plants in your area, most implants need to have external partners in order to fill things that they can't do internally. They tend to gravitate towards these kinds of online print environments where they can control what goes out to you and what they do internally. This could be a great way for you to make offers into those kinds of shops that you might not have been able to get traction with before. 
    • [00:25:13] Ryan McAbee: That leads us to incentives. So this is the famous thing of bundling an extra product, of offering a percentage discount, offering a one-time discount.
    • It's all different kind of creative ways you can incentivize people from a financial perspective to do something. I would say this is not only for your customers, because a lot of this is strategic change that you have to make with inside of our shop and the staff that you have. I think a great way to, to get started initially is to incentivize your sales force, your CSRs, your estimators. Think about programs for them so that they become the the ones that are talking about these new offerings to your customers because they're the ones that are interfacing with them, particularly your salesforce and your CSRs. Incentivize them to do that. Whether that's, a day off at the end of the month or whatever. It can be so many different ways you can do this. 
    • [00:26:01] Pat McGrew: I have actually seen a sales organization put up a wide screen TV as an incentive for getting someone on board with the program.
    • [00:26:11] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, I mean there's just a million and one ways you can be creative and think about how to do this. But I would say this is not just for the customers. It's also look and see how you can apply it internally. 
    • Then the last thing for your customers is make sure they have enough breadcrumbs to be able to figure out how to use something without having to call you every time they need something.
    • This goes on the design aspect up front that we talked about. Best practices in creating the storefront. Making sure you're minimizing the number of clicks and options and choices for them to use. Also, do you have an a frequently asked question section? Do you have any kind of help? Guides, tutorials, video tutorials? All these things can minimize the amount of frustration that your customer has, your sales team has; everybody involved in the process. So make sure you have those assets built and ready to go. When you launch with your customers. 
    • [00:26:57] Pat McGrew: Remember, again, I'm going to keep saying it. It's not one and done. You do have to keep coming back and revisiting these support elements as well. As you add new equipment, as you add new products, you may need to expand certain sections of your help environment in order to ensure that people can use these new products and services. 
    • [00:27:18] Ryan McAbee: That is a great introductory to how to sell print online. Just some best practices that we've seen. Tips to get you over some of the classic hurdles that we've seen in implementations of trying to sell print online and getting that web-to-print system put in place.
    • Thank you for joining us and we hope to see you soon on a future episode here at The Print University.