Print Management Blog
Fri, 30 Jan 2009
I attended the IPIA conference on "The Revolution of Sustainable, Profitable Printing" at the Ricoh Stadium Coventry yesterday. The conference was addressing the question of what it is that a modern printer needs to do to survive and grow in the current, difficult & competitive marketplace. This was attended by both printers and print management companies (PMC's) so a lively debate ensued.
It was glaringly obvious that business success is not about having the best production kit, but about having a process to manage sales. The speakers felt (and to be fair the audience seemed to agree) that in most cases the print business focus is NOT on Customers and profitable growth, and trying to compete on price is the way to bankruptcy. More sales of a better quality drive profit, not better machinery.
In many ways I felt reassured rather than dismayed. Businesses only fail because they don't sell enough. Full stop. We have been banging on for a couple of years about how more sales of a better quality will come from differentiating yourself and understanding your customers needs using decent CRM which leads to closer working relationships. Use web based technology this way to drive profits, and ROI on Business Builder is in weeks not months or years. And yet we still speak to businesses that think nothing of spending Hundreds of Thousands of Pounds on production kit but baulk at systems for a fraction of the cost that will make more difference to their business than anything else they spend money on. Perhaps because if you have 50 tons of metal in your factory it looks more valuable?
It's about a change to a customer centric approach to how you run your business. That has nothing to do with your production kit and everything to do with selling more.
What do you think?
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