New skills
A good VDP (Variable Data Printing) workflow is a good first step to becoming a Marketing Services Provider. Although software is required, the primary success element with VDP is how well it is used.
Our initial goal is to help company owners define what it takes to build and maintain a good VDP workflow and sales model. We discard the popular myth that VDP in full colour should always be complex, slow and costly.
How can salespeople confidently sell variable colour printing services, when they know the job will likely run late, possibly have errors and result in an angry customer?
Let’s start with some benchmarks
Ideally, once the database and layout aspects are finalised, and the Mac/PC ‘print button’ pressed, a variable full colour job with say 5,000 fully personalized pages, sent to a modern production printing system should take only a few minutes longer to process and print, than say a normal 5,000 sheet ‘static’ job.
However in reality, this is seldom the case, for some very specific and resolvable reasons. It’s seldom the software itself, although some packages are easier to set up and may run faster than others. The main problems stem from how the computers are configured, software used and the files prepared.
I’ll provide examples and benchmarks on typical jobs and what effort is required to run them, helping users clearly understand:
- the types of jobs to take on
- how to promote these services
- setting campaign goals and expectations
- how to correctly setup and run VDP jobs
- helping customers build and maintain databases
- essential response tools – building personalised urls
- what to charge and how to boost those margins
Already have VDP Software?
Some may have already started offering Variable Colour Printing services, but annoyed that these jobs take much longer than expected. Days instead of hours. Hours instead of minutes required for a similar ‘static’ job. We can help.
For example, those who currently use the XMPie uDirect Studio solution will benefit immensely from our training and workflow acceleration package. In terms of productivity, we can make XMPie work much faster and much more efficiently – We guarantee to at least double any users current processing speed, or there’s no charge for our time. (In one case 6 hours of processing time we slashed to just 12 minutes, as well as fixing the colours and improving quality).
Part 2 - Web2Print & e-Marketing Services
Once the VDP workflow and processes are sorted, which includes training for salespeople, we can look at adding in other enhancements and new customer services.
