Printing these days isn't just ink on paper anymore. Unfortunately, many print sales reps do not understand this. Let me explain what I mean:
When I meet with someone for the first time, one of the first questions I ask them is not "What sort of printing do you do?" or "Can I quote this piece for you?". Rather, I ask them "what are you doing to market yourself or your clients?" By looking at the bigger picture, I am more able to assess my client's needs and point them in the right direction. After all, why would I try to sell them something that wasn't beneficial to them?
You guys have all heard the saying, "Joe sure is a good salesman. He could sell an ice machine to an eskimo." If Joe would stop to think for a second, he would realize that in a few months when the novelty of owning a new ice machine wears off, little eskimo man will be sitting in his igloo with a huge invoice and probably some frostbite! So call me whatever you want, but unlike Joe, I'm taking my ice machine to Hawaii where I know I'll be giving customers what they need and want!
Tip of the day: Stop selling and start consulting!
Posts
My two cents.Before the first meeting check out the website, if they have one. That's how they are doing their marketing (they think.) usually a pretty brief examination of the site, will give you a gezillion ideas about how to use print to get people to know about the website.
ReplyDeletePurls in tinyurl formats on the back of a series of postcards is a cheap pretty riskless way to test the waters. The trick is that the real value is in the data that can be harvested from clicks.
It can tell the business where there might be pockets of interest - either in verticals or geographically. The cool thing is that you don't need massive response. Just some response.
Three responses from one zip code is not a bad evidence of interest. Next step is to do more postcards to that area to test out the hypothesis.
The value is predictative analytics, the postcard or newsletter is just the way to assemble it. it gets you out of price competition for the postcard. If you're selling the data harvest, you can sometimes make money by selling the print at a very very low margin.
If you do the first intervention with digital and use Mindfire for the purls, you can get the customer into the game at a very low cost, which you can put in the cost of sales column.