Traditional print selling is dead - Print21 magazine article

Industry experts have been saying for some time that the customary ways of selling print increasingly resemble the Norwegian Blue Parrot; they are no more, have ceased to be. Despite this and growing evidence that many print companies are finding it tougher to find new customers, the industry has not made the transition to the brave new world of online sales and direct marketing. So if you think the old ‘quote and hope’ methods are still alive and kicking (or even merely pining for the fjords), then listen closely while Peter Barnet adds another nail in the coffin lid.

That’s it folks. Just like Elvis, vinyl records and drop kicks in the AFL, the traditional print selling techniques that we may have been using are gone.

Gone, too, are the print buyers who, predominantly male, used to survey every proof with an eyeglass and asked to get another proof and another proof until the skin tones were a perfect match to the photos they had. The new print buyers who are replacing them are Generation Y, about 25-28 years old and female. They are highly active on the internet and use it to get most of their information. They use social networking sites such as Facebook and twitter to communicate with their friends and organise their social lives. They live on the internet and their mobile!

This shift in the characteristics and make-up of your customer demographic is the biggest single reason why traditional print selling is dead and you need to start to change your focus. Let me explain by first telling you a little bit about the future.

In case you have not heard about it or seen the latest statistics on Vistaprint, I went to the website and got them for you. All this information is current as at the end of September 2009. Since their inception in 2005, this online print business <www.vistaprint.com> has grown from revenue of US$90 million to US$515milion. Revenue is up US$150 million in the last 12 months alone. They are predicting to slow down a little in 2010 and grow to approximately US$600 million in revenue. The website attracts more than 230 million sessions each year and there are approximately 1.4 million new Vistaprint customers every three months. The business processes nearly 45,000 orders per day with a staggering 41 per cent coming from non-US markets. Here is the killer statistic: 66 per cent of these orders come from repeat business while 34 per cent are from new customers!

Having had a customer experience with Vistaprint, I can report that, yes, it is true I got 250 ‘free’ business cards delivered to my door in under a week for about $10. I then got an email promotion a day for another 365 days whereupon they stopped because I had failed to purchase anything else. No one called me, nor came to see me, nor even sent me anything in the post. They may well sell to a lot of one-off customers like me but the stats show that 66 per cent are repeat purchasers and that 41 per cent are from outside US so it is not outside reality to believe that some business buyers of print are using Vistaprint – in fact I know they are!

So if this is happening now and the demographics of your customers are changing, what does this mean? As with most things, the internet has changed selling forever. It doesn’t mean that you need to sell up tomorrow and start an internet print business but it does mean you have to radically change your approach. Let’s look at a couple of ways you can start to prepare to sell in new ways.

Are you adding value?
Is your sales team still selling in the same old way? Here is a question to ask all your sales people or even your customers. At the end of each sales call, could you honestly say, hand on heart, that you could write a cheque out for $500 and hand it to the customer based on the value of the sales call to them? Put another way, do your customers get $500 worth of value every time you call on them?

Last year, the chief executive of global sales consultancy Huthwaite, Tom Snyder, was in Australia to discuss his new book Escaping the Price Driven Sale – How World Class Sellers Create Extraordinary Profit. He warned that hundreds of thousands of salespeople worldwide will lose their jobs in the next five years unless they re-invent themselves and the way they do business. The subject of his book could not be more relevant in our industry where a lot of printers are using the ‘quote and hope’ method of selling. So what does Tom mean?

“There are a couple of things that are going on, but the most important impact is related to the effect the internet is having on the sales profession. If you think back 10 years ago, prior to the internet becoming an important and invaluable tool inside most businesses, the only way that someone seeking to purchase a product or a service, particularly in a business-to-business frame of reference, or they could get information, was in meeting with a sales person face-to-face.

“Now that the internet has become a prominent part of every office everywhere, they have access to all of the information about products and services from multiple suppliers and lots of comparative information without ever seeing a sales person. This has a number of different impacts, but most important is that the customer is now overwhelmed with information instead of starved for it, and they tend to default down to simply comparing prices unless a sales function can do something different with them.”

Think about how you are monitoring your sales people. If you are still measuring them purely on the number of calls they make each day then this is no longer relevant or reliable. A better measure is the amount of business in their sales pipeline.

Tom went on to say: “In 1988 the first version of Powerpoint was released and it began to erode the way that the sales function would conduct itself. We began to get in the sales function this business of simply showing slide after slide about the kinds of things we can do, and unfortunately that simply compounded these problems that were created in the internet – we’re providing too much information of too little value to the people we depend upon as our customer base.”

The conclusion of the Huthwaite research was “that if you don’t do something to provide your customers discovery, and that discovery is about their own business and about themselves – if all you’re doing is providing information particularly in an electronic format – you’re not doing much to differentiate yourself, and the customer will ultimately default to who’s cheapest as their only decision criteria.”

At the moment, this default decision is not just the lowest quote the customer has received but it is starting to look like Vistaprint. If you are not sure what your customers want then the answer is easy – go out and see the top 20 in your business and ask them. The more you can add value to the business relationship, the less likely they are to use Vistaprint as the default.

Change your offer
There were some key messages from the Connect and PODi seminars held in Sydney last year. The fact that there was a low turnout of industry people present to hear what were no doubt valuable presentations would indicate that maybe we are not ready for the death of traditional print selling yet.

Barb Pellow of US-based InfoTrends gave an in-depth report at the Connect seminar on the move by US printing companies in particular to changing from print service providers (PSPs) to marketing service providers (MSPs). We are hearing this more and more, yet not many companies are making the change in Australia. Why are we not responding to the growing importance of the internet and direct marketing, and transforming print businesses into creative solution providers?

Moving from traditional print selling methods to new ones which our new customer would like to see would mean providing return-on-investment (ROI), multi-channel relationship marketing services. Pellow also said: “Repositioning printing companies is essential for long-term survival.”

I agree with her when she urged printers to re-brand their businesses, getting rid of the word print from their name. People don’t buy the print aspect, they buy whatever is the success of the service.

“Success equals repositioning. There is a digital divide in printing and if you are on the wrong side of it, it is not a pretty picture,” she warned.

What is your plan to make sure you are on the right side of the divide in your business?

Deliver more services
Industry guru, Andy Tribute, was also at the Connect seminar and has been banging on about this very topic for at least the last 10 years, so I am not on my own here when I talk about the death of traditional selling in printing. Here are some statistics that Tribute presented out of Europe.

“In Europe the failure rate of printing companies is 250 per cent higher than average across the economy. One in four printing businesses is losing money. But the advancement of digital printing is likely to be the saviour for most commercial printers. Up to 60 per cent of digital printing is work transferred from offset, up from less than 10 per cent in 2000, while 20 per cent now uses some form of variable data. This is set to rise.”

If you want to build a sustainable print business you simply need to deliver more services. For every dollar spent on printing, up to six more are spent in complementary services, such as content design and creation, finishing and delivery logistics. This is a marketing service provider’s obvious growth area.

We know the internet has changed our world forever; it has certainly changed the way we sell. The best sales trainers in the world (apart from myself), Huthwaite, also agree. So if selling is facing a massive change then selling print the traditional way has to be dead or dying at least. According to industry experts this is the case. So if we are not using this as a catalyst to change our business model then we too might go the way of Elvis and be found working in a McDonald’s drive thru.