The printing industry has an enemy.
It isn't so much that the price of print has fallen through the floor or
profitability (though they are totally shit) or that print management as
a genus has ripped profits out of printers ( though they often have) or
that credit is unavailable ( though broadly it is) etc etc, no the real
enemy of the print industry is.... irrelevancy. Who needs it?
Be honest why would you want to deal with it? As a buyer you always feel
inadequate and you have to be on-guard for being ripped off, extras etc.
They use terms you don't understand and often involve you in areas you
feel unsure of- not least industrial estates at ungodly hours. On top
of that, print isn't a "must-have" skill set on your CV, unlike web 2.0
marketing, data analytics and other sexy things to learn, so every
minute I spend learning about print I'm not learning about something
that will propel my career to the stratosphere over the next 10 years.
Now one would think the future of the print industry is therefore bleak
and return to the PrintWeek blogs to bang on about BGP/PM killing your
B1 presses loading board or trying to shag the one blond bird in the
industry with your 'subtle' innuendo. How that's going to sort out all
your ills only you know....
However the opposite is true and print doesn't have to become the latest
casualty following in the wake of typesetting and repro into obscurity.
This is how to do it (in my opinion, but I have yet to meet anyone with
a problem with it once they have run through it). It is a twin, parallel
approach ( ie they run together and not one after another). It is common
sense broadly but like all things it's about the execution not the idea,
therefore the only printers that will survive aren't those with a good
press or print, but an intellectually able management team. Read Darwin
if you want to know why this is inevitably the case...
No-brainer for starters. Fill your presses with as much work as you can
from your core clients and over-service them. Never let them down. Build
trust and ask them what else they print that you could have a look at.
Get this work as well. Then ask if you can help them by offering them
"your DAM system" to keep brand integrity ( your FTP will do for
starters). Then offer data services ( buy lists for them, de-dupe) and
delivery services ( Royal Mail walk-sort, leaflet distribution,
packaging etc etc) then offer them a internet portal where they can see
all this.You will see that you are becoming more and more pivotal to
your client if you offer this clearly- you are the one that they come to
to facilitate all their communications with their clients. You are
highly relevant to their success not peripheral. You will make more
money AND they will love you more for it. Win-win.
The other nice thing about it is that you don't actually need to buy
anything or invest in anything really, as it is already there or free or
able to be bought in on a cost-per-use basis. All the skill set for this
is in a printers pre-press, customer service or post-press departments.
What is needs is a strategy to bring it together in a coherent way (
this is where the able management team comes in).Handily these is a
sensible framework out there in the BPIF Customer-Centric strategy ( or
summat like). It's free to download via the website for non-members as
well. If you can't find it email me and I will forward a copy ( it
involves cogs and looks very whizzy!).
Then move beyond this to be the central way that clients deliver their
message to their clients and you will be pivotal to your clients and the
price you get for your press-hour will be a dim and distant past.
The nice thing about the print industry is that we already know our
customers brand ( often better than they themselves do in the SME
world), we are local, low-cost, tech-savvy, colour savvy, down to earth
and as long as we don't abuse the trust of customers by ripping them off
or letting them down, we are there for the long term. As they grow, we
grow.
We also have free tools for the printing industry that can help printers
along the way to a profitable future:
Your presses are likely to be running at less than full capacity so get
sales without getting more salespeople by using
www.FreePrintSales.com(or FPS).On there is a list of all the non-contract jobs we have and you
just give a price ( no-negotiation, as it is time-consuming and
therefore expensive). You either win the work or get feedback as to how
your price stacked up. This marketplace insight is often the first time
a printer has seen honestly where they sit in the market and often shows
areas where they can RAISE prices without risking lose work as well as
showing them they are woefully uncompetitive. Both bits of info are
useful when you are quoting out in the market generally ( nothing to do
with WEBMART) and help to increase your profitability, even if you never
win a job from WEBMART!
As we place most work with the best printers and not the cheapest, if
over the course of jobs going though your rankings (each job you get
ranked by WEBMART and our end client... but worry not, you have the
opportunity to do the same to us and our client as well!) are amongst
the best, you will be invited to become a 'Dynamic Price' ( or DP)
supplier where you give us your cost rates and then can vary your price
onto the market in real-time. The benefit of this is that if we get an
order based on your price you will get the order without having to pitch
against all the other printers. You helped us win it so you should get
it in return- it only seems fair. Worry not if things have changed since
then ( a planning board is an ever moving feast after all)- if you don't
want it you don't have to take it; we would just put it on
FreePrintSales and place it that way.
When your customer wants you to print something you haven't printed
before ( see why they would do this above!) you need often to
outsource-with-confidence which of course you can do yourself and mark
it up to make new margin. We have tried to make it easy ( and free of
course) by offering this trade-only pricing through
www.FreePrintManangement.com ( if you have registered on FreePrintSales,
the same facility is available on here as well- you don't have to
register twice). We give you an instant price with our 8% margin for
project management of the job should you give it built in already AND it
gives you a suggested sell price to your customer ( after all if you've
not sold it before how would you know what price to sell it at without
looking silly-either way!)
Once you have filled your presses and are gaining all the other print
that you can from your client, you will be making good money and will
move from survival mode, to prosper mode. Now you need different things,
complimentary services, a unified account management structure and
client-facing software to make it easy for both you and them. There are
loads of web2print solutions out there and most of them are pretty good
and not expensive. I think that Printweek and PMM have run some tests
recently so have a look on their websites.
We have created our own ( called Print Manager +) which odes all theirs
does and more. Because we develop it in house we can give it away to the
printers that we work most closely with, skinned as their own site, to
allow them to be more productive and more profitable. The best printers
are usually the most profitable in my experience.
The print industry can once again be pivotal to our clients by being the
facilitator, the executor, the replicator of our clients message for our
mutual gain. Print and prosper.
I hope this has been useful- happy to chat through with any printer who
wants further details or can't quite see what the bleedin' hell I am on
about. It does offer a way out, I assure you. Best way is via my email
address simon.biltcliffe@webmartUK.com
Have a good weekend y'all!
Simon
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