How to Launch New Services

The migrating of your digital print/mailing business from a jobbing shop into a Marketing Services Organisation that covers VDP and cross-media services is not without significant challenges, both technological, sales and culture. Printers are not marketers. Their focus is production; implementation.

But it’s not something that you can put off either. More and more of our traditional clients are being approached by online marketing and service providers every day, migrating their marketing to email and the web, excluding print altogether.

The pace of change is another problem that’s affecting everyone. According to a recent article in Direct Marketing Mag, even Marketers are finding it difficult to keep up with all the new technologies and communications trends. To quote the article “Marketers need to know how the world has changed. If they keep on doing what they have always done they’ll find themselves obsolete,”. The same could be said of print. The longer we delay, the more difficult it becomes as the precious funds needed for new processes, promotion and training slowly dry up, as traditional print work continues to decline.

Most of the industry vendors do offer various tools and guidebooks to help us. Some of the best material we’ve seen has been from Kodak. Although of low profile downunder, in the US they’re often leading the way in getting printers across the line. This is part of Kodak’s strategy to help printers migrate from print, to marketing services providers, recently introducing a new professional services group. It was outlined in a recent whattheythink.com article. (read here)

When you have an hour, watch this video which was part of a series Kodak produced last year. There’s no hard sell, simply good advice. Entitled "Leading Ways to Launch New Services"

The follow-up video, “How to sell and profit from new services” you can view here. (It has a 5min delayed start).

Hot topic on LinkedIn.com

One of the longest discussions on a linkedin.com forum recently was entitled "Printers as Media Advisors". It provided a wide range of opinions and tips to help printers better understand what’s needed. As discussed in the above presentation and forums, buying the needed equipment and/or software is the easy bit.

And sort out your internal processes!

Beyond the technology, there needs to be a coherent strategy. The right software, staff training and a good marketing plan are but three key items that need addressing to become a successful Marketing Services Provider. Your internal costs and workflow processes likely also need attention.

Start by examining the efficiency of your quoting and the number of human interactions needed as a job is produced. The best, highest growth companies running dozens or hundreds of jobs per day have more automated systems, providing quote turnaround times measured in minutes, not hours or days. 

For those more into ”solution selling", which MSPs will aspire to, timeframes can be longer, as getting them a price is but one factor. However presenting detailed ‘proposals’ detailing benefits, as opposed to ‘quotes’ being focused upon price, is in itself a big change for most print salespeople and CSRs.

The best operations have less human ‘touchpoints’ too, as jobs are processed. Factoring in quoting, files, production, finishing, packing and billing typically requires 25-30 human touches per job in most establishments. Through the use of advanced workflow technologies and processes, the industry profit leaders have slashed it down to 5 for most digital jobs – Sometimes halving their internal costs AND turnaround times.  (How else could industry leaders like Vistaprint, Mimeo, Moo, Expresscopy etc make a profit on producing hundreds/thousands of $50-100 jobs?)

Competing against, or taking clients off these operations is near impossible.

To find out how to calculate touchpoints, complete a value-stream map. These workflow upgrades do take 6-12 months of detailed work and are best introduced in stages, allowing staff to adapt. JDF toolsets come into play too. But we finally eliminate paper job bags, along with those scheduling whiteboards, replaced by PCs and cheap plasma screens. But it makes for a super-efficient, highly profitable operation, with fewer errors, happier staff, and clients.

Do you have the right business processes and technology plan in place? Ask for our free guide.

Checkout this video