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British Print - making change positive IPIA - Independent Print Industries Association

Driving Sales Volume in Print – Facts Problems and Solutions #2

To paraphrase Sir John Harvey-Jones “businesses don’t fail because they don’t have good products or good people or good equipment. They fail because they don’t sell enough.”

These weekly bulletins are specifically for the print industry and will look at how software technology can help solve common problems in developing and controlling cost effectively sales volume in the print industry. Each week we will look at one of the following situations, More Reps = More Sales, Managing Marketing, Controlling Business Acquisitions For More Sales and Trading On Line - The Challenges.

Facts, Problems and Solutions #2

a) Managing Marketing effectiveness
Statistically you can only expect a 2-4% return on mail campaigns sent. So marketing can be expensive to run for limited return especially if it’s done in isolation of any follow up activity.

Fact: Marketing campaign quality relies on the quality and availability of your data on customers and prospects. By “Data” we simply mean relevant customer and prospect information.

Problem: By that definition most printers customer facing staff - which includes field sales, maybe internal telesales, accounts staff, receptionist – have information that would be valuable for marketing, but frequently it is on Post-It pads, on bits of paper, scribbled on the back of business cards, on spreadsheets, Outlook contact data, or in reps laptops. So where it isn’t is anywhere useful to you !

Whether campaigning by email, post (mail merge), SMS or telemarketing, if data is in so many places some data will be missed, incomplete or duplicated when campaigns are run. This means marketing campaigns cannot be run with confidence to any group of your customers.

Also, marketing staff sometimes expect to work from home which can be difficult to control.

Solution:

  • Put all your data about customers and prospects on to a single database system on the web and make all customer facing staff use it. As little incremental changes will be made to the database as staff use the system each day, data will be more accurate and you will sound more professional when customers call.
  • Many modern database systems like TBM incorporate campaign management functionality, so that accurate data which is built up over time and stored in a single place can be easily accessed and filtered (this filtering creates what is referred to as a subset of the database) to allow campaigns to be easily sent to whatever subset you like
  • A couple more clicks, and the same data subset can be dropped directly into sales or telesales team diaries to follow up making end to end marketing very efficient and the success of it quantifiable
  • Use this database as your main sales staff diary system and synchronise it with Outlook. Where ever staff are working from, everyone can see each others availability instantly.
  • A single database on the web means staff can work from home and campaigns sent from home.
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