The Modern Tower of Babel The relationship that printers have with the


marketplace has changed, so what printers offer to the marketplace has to change. Printing is about making products, but so is just about everything. Advertising is also about making products—namely ads—but an ad is the end result of a larger process that involves understanding what the customer is trying to accomplish.


Customers are looking for overall “brand managers” who can handle a wide variety of applications.


Few people walk into an ad agency and say “I want


a 4x6-inch ad, four-color, by Thursday. How much would that cost?” Advertisers and their agencies have an intimate relationship that is about understanding the agency’s customer’s objectives and developing the right products—the right ads that use the right media—to meet those objectives. In contrast, the average print business has grown


used to customers who walk in and say “I want a 6x9-inch postcard, 4/1, 10,000 copies, by Thursday, here’s my file. How much would that cost?” This is the way the printing industry’s brain has been wired since Gutenberg. The questions printers ask customers are


“What quantity?” “Four-color or black-and-white?” and “What kind of paper?” Today’s marketing executives don’t use these kinds


of terms and they don’t ask those kinds of questions. They ask, “How can I increase customer engagement?” and “What is the best lead- or prospect-nurturing process?” But printers don’t naturally think this way. Sure, print salespeople nurture leads but they don’t think about their role in the full context of their customers’ businesses. So when printer and potential customer get


together, it’s a kind of Tower of Babel, where no one is speaking the same language. The lingual disparity


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has gotten wider with the diversity of digital media and strategies. Printers should not try to sell a product. Rather,


they should help the customer meet their objectives. To do that, it’s important to understand what the customer’s objectives actually are. That requires a much deeper, more intimate relationship than taking orders. In other words, print businesses need to be more like agencies.


Death of a Salesman The traditional print salesperson is becoming a


thing of the past. E-commerce is partially responsible, but traditional print sales are being superseded by


“business development.” Teams, whose members are inside and outside the business, are responsible for various parts of the business development process and collaborate to understand client objectives from different perspectives. A designer may chime in to offer ways of handling a project from a creative point of view, for example. How do the logistics of this work? Project


management applications like Basecamp and Slack, or customer relations management (CRM) programs like Salesforce, provide a central forum where all the participants in a particular project, or for a particular client, get together. It’s where background information is presented, client touch points identified, responsibilities assigned, deadlines and milestones set, and so on. This is how you get to speak the language of the client, by bringing together the people who can translate. It’s not Babel if you immerse yourself in the language and the new tools of the marketplace.


Adapted from the book The Third Wave by Dr. Webb and Richard Romano, available at Amazon.com. (Visit amzn.to/2BbcnEO or just ask Alexa to get it.) Dr. Webb will be keynoting the TAGA 2018 Annual Technical Conference, March 18–21 in Baltimore. Attendees will receive a special edition of the book courtesy of Konica Minolta Business Solutions. Dr. Webb and Romano have co-authored six books about the industry.


LEARN MORE... Forecast | 2018


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