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Mike Peterson of Gabriel Group answered a few questions after the Premier Partners Congress at Graph Expo and I'm finally sharing them with you.
Q: What do you see as the major challenges for print service providers trying to develop a Business Development Mindset?
A: The major challenge is getting more print providers to take the plunge into Variable Data Printing and Web-to-print. This is where the industry is going, but many printers are unwilling to invest the time and/or energy in taking advantage of today’s capabilities of software and equipment. Getting them over that hurdle is the biggest challenge. They know they need to be doing it, but continue to put it off.
Q: Bo Burlingham was the keynote speaker for the Premier Partners Congress and talked about Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. How do the concepts Burlingham presented parallel with the graphic communication industry?
A: I was very impressed with his presentation and feel that the goals in our organization seek to emulate some of the companies that Bo discussed. I think that it is important in our industry to be the best resource at fewer things than everything to everybody. With all of the technology and equipment available, one company cannot do it all. So do what you do well, treat your employees well, and treat your customers well.
Q: A core message presented at the Premier Partners Congress was the need for printers to go beyond ink on paper and partner with customers to help them grow their business by providing multi-channel communication solutions. What is Gabriel Group doing to achieve these goals?
A: We have already begun to work with our customers on multi-channel campaigns to take advantage of multiple mediums to spread their message and reach more customers and prospects in different ways. We are looking to Xerox to assist us in maximizing this approach with our clients through their partnerships with resources such as Pageflex.
Adam Dewitz
Printmode
Peter Muir, MC of the Premier Partners Congress has launched a blog for his company Bizucate:
We see so many companies struggling with the need to get a word out...we too have issues keeping in touch with all our great customers and potential customers and we hope this blog will help let you know what we are thinking, where we are going and hope that you'll like to learn about some great opportunities for all of us to be successful.
Check it out at http://www.bizucate.typepad.com/
At the conclusion of the Premier Partners Congress last week, I asked attendee Bernice LeMaire, Marketing Product Manager for Digital Color at Standard Register if she would do a mini-interview to capture her thoughts on the discussions that took place throughout the day.
What was your major take-way from the Premier Partner Congress?
The discussion on working with designers, and the discussion on variable
data printing in action. I also enjoyed the presentation by Anne Mulcahy.
How has the Premier Partners Program been beneficial to you?
It's always nice to listen to what other printers are doing, where
they are experiencing success or not. It's also good to see and hear what's
new in the industry.
With your background in creative, what do print service providers
need to know or do when working with creatives.
Be aware that designers don't also know how to prepare files for print. Be prepared to teach them.
Get involved in the process from the beginning. You are more likely
to win the contract if it was your idea or you helped develop
a concept. Be an active participant in the process not just a print vendor.
John Mahoney of The Mahoney Company and Dan Johnson, Strategic Relationship Manager with Intel are discussing how John's company partnered with Intel to provide marketing communication solutions that helped Intel increase response and ROI.
The Problem
Intel needed to reach executives at Fortune 2000 companies to market a new version of Hyperion's Business Performance Management software.
This audience has historically been hard to reach via traditional marketing programs.
The (Personalized) Solution
The Mahoney Company developed a personalized marketing campaign that used multiple personalized direct mailers to drive recipients to a personalized URL. Both the direct mail pieces and the web site landing page were personalized to contain content specific to the recipients industry and position (e.g CIO in healthcare).
The Results
Intel received a response rate of 3.24% and opened a dialogue with their target market.
Xerox Resources for Creatives
Xerox has number of resources for the creative segment on their website at www.xerox.com/creative. Included on the site are hints and tips on designing for digital and selecting the proper paper for a job.
There are also number of case studies on successful digital printing campaigns. And a couple links on how to buy their solutions.
Blogs for Creatives
There are number of blogs that provide tips and commentary for all things creative. Here are a couple that have caught my eye (I subscribe to and read regularly):
Did I miss any good creative blogs? Link them up in the comments.
According to Bob Wagner, VP of Xerox’s Creative Services Business:
91% of "creatives" specify, recommend, approve, or buy print – a whopping $26 billion per year in North America. In spite of the creative professionals’ massive print buying influence, just 15% of print and prepress firms call on creatives. "And that’s a really big opportunity lost."
Bob has assembled a panel of creatives and printers to talk about how and why print service providers should partner with creatives. The panel includes:
Getting Creatives Attention
Mary Day is providing some tips on how to engage the creative community and stand out from the rest:
- Offer more than just prices. Provide creative input based on their project specs.
- Educate and teach them about the latest printing technology, and how it can be leveraged in their current projects.
- Engage the creative community by getting involved with industry associations and sponsor community events.
Engaging the Community
Copy General Corp engages the creative community by sponsoring educational events held by the Washington, D.C. InDesign User Group. Copy General Corp's involvement in these events helps build their brand and promotes their status as reliable source of information for the creative community.
Peter Muir, President, Bizucate (and MC of the congress) is talking about opportunities for printers to help customers succeed.
Print service providers can no longer ask Do you have anything for me to print? Printers need to help customers develop communication strategies that will enable growth in their customer's business.
3 Factors That Enable Future Success
Peter presents three factors that enable future success for the print service provider:
Buy in from top to bottom, bottom to top and left to right - Everyone needs to agree with, and understand organization change. An efficient and organic workflow - The entire workflow: people, processes, technology must be efficient. A commitment to grow their customers businesses. Again, Do you have anything for me to print? won't cut it anymore. We need to be asking How can I help you grow your business?
PrintingForLess.com Case Study
Andy Field founded PrintingForLess.com in 1996 to cater to the Livingston, MT region. In his first year he had 10 employees and no profits. In 1998, Andy went global by developing a system that enabled the company to use the internet to sell print.
PrintingForLess.com now has a 4 year average annual sales growth of 186.5%. In 2005 they had $15 million dollars in revenue. And they've made Inc Magazine's Inc. 500 3 years in a row.
Andy and his company didn't achieve this success just putting ink on paper. They targeted small growing companies and helped them communicate.
Business Development Mindset
It all boils down to developing a business development mindset. Printers need to help their customers convert ideas to opportunities, create plans of action and strategies from those opportunities, and then help them act on the strategies.
The greatest opportunity for printers is for them to educate their customers on how they can grow their business using a mix of printed and electronic communication.
When I told my circle of printer friends I would be blogging Xerox's Premier Partners Congress during Graph Expo, the common response was, What's that?
Beyond telling them it was a meeting of Xerox's customers that are innovators in digital printing, I had no idea.
This morning Tom Wetjen, VP of Xerox Worldwide Graphic Communications Industry shared Xerox's vision for the Premier Partners Program:
Create a global, cross-segmented Community of Practice for networking
and knowledge sharing. Establish a direct-line, two-way privileged communications channel. And maintain an infrastructure to facilitate business sharing
Sharing Knowledge
The Premier Partners Program shares knowledge through:
Communication Programs – distribution of print and electronic newsletters. Premier Partners Community Web Site - a knowledge base of case studies, industry information from industry associations and trade groups. See the Xerox Graphic Arts Premier Partners website for more info. Information about Xerox and Partner Offerings - Access to Xerox's ProfitAccelerator toolset. - In the Balance Blog - an ongoing discussion of innovation across the graphic communication industry.
More information
If you have any questions about the program, contact John Laurence at Xerox.
Xerox has asked me to help them cover their 4th Annual Premier Partners Congress taking place in Chicago during the Graph Expo and Converting Expo 2006.
Check back throughout the day for more coverage from the event.
Adam Dewitz, Printmode.net
On Monday, Oct. 16, I’ll be speaking at the Xerox Premier Partners event in Chicago, and I’m looking forward to it. I’ve never spoken to a group of printers before, but I suspect many of those in attendance will strongly identify with the businesses I write about in my book, Small Giant: Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big. In the nearly 24 years I’ve been at Inc. magazine, I’ve seen thousands of companies, including quite a few printing businesses, and I’ve had the privilege of getting to know their founders, leaders, and owners. As a group, they are among the most forward-thinking business practitioners I’ve met. They understand that it takes more than sales to make a company great.
My message, in a nutshell, is this: There is no rule that says you have to grow your business as much and as fast as you can. Whether you realize it or not, you have a choice. Your company can be great—the best at what it does, fabulous to do business with, a terrific place to work, an integral part of its community—without going public, doing mergers and acquisitions, spreading out geographically, or generally following the well-worn route of other successful companies. You can do none of those things and still be extremely successful, be on the cutting edge of change, make lots of money, and have a great life.
Not that there’s anything wrong with being great and big, but greatness and bigness are not the same, as the companies in my book demonstrate. What’s more, the drive to ramp up sales can sometimes create obstacles to greatness. That’s why small giants like Anchor Brewing, Clif Bar, Righteous Babe Records, and CitiStorage, among others, have been very careful in deciding which growth opportunities to seize and which ones to forego. In the process, they have discovered how to generate a kind of excitement and magnetism that people inside and outside the business find irresistible. It’s what I call “mojo.”
Printers face the same challenges, opportunities, and choices that the companies I write about have confronted. I’m sure that some printers have made similar decisions and generated their own brand of mojo. A few of them may even be in the audience on Monday, and I look forward to sharing what I’ve learned from the small giants I know—and to meeting others.
Bo Burlingham
Editor at Large, Inc. Magazine
Author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to be Great Instead of Big
With the exception of last year’s Print show, this year’s Graph Expo is the biggest ever. With 5,000 products from 550 exhibitors, I might call it a technology avalanche. But it’s confusing. Printers must really be IT savvy to survive. If you don’t understand IT, you’re out of schlitz real quick.
The Must See ‘ems selection committee spent the last 6-8 weeks screening the avalanche of equipment coming to Graph Expo and here are the top five technologies they agree printers must understand and implement to ensure survival:
1. Management Information Systems (MIS)—perhaps a surprise as number one, this is a core piece of technology that printers have to come to grips with. No matter what segment you’re in, you can’t operate on gut, you have to operate on information, and you get that from a print oriented information system.
2. Job Definition Format (JDF)—right on the heels of MIS, the committee thinks JDF is going to be the most talked about—but least implemented—technology at the show.
3. Digital Printing Developments—edging out conventional lithography, data shows that digital printing is a high grow technology. We expect the battle to heat up with new entries from those NOT in the number one or two spot in the industry. There will be lots of attention and lots of competition here and along those lines, we expect to see the beginnings of inkjet-based technology nipping at the heels of toner-based technology.
4. Workflow Enhancements—this can be confusing for printers as everybody at the show says step right up and see my workflow. But understanding and coming to grips with workflow and changes in technologies is an important piece of what is being showcased.
5. Color Management and Bindery Development—tied for fifth place, color management must happen from the beginning of the creative process until we deposit something on a substrate. While not a hot spot for most printers, there will be quite a bit of advancement in bindery development, whether part of inline workflow, direct mail or standalone, it’s a catch-all category.
The seminars on print management and IT (Executive Outlook, the 70 show-sponsored seminars and manufacturer seminars on the show floor) are essential for maximizing the educational experience at Graph Expo. If you participate in these and take the time to explore the technologies on the show floor, Graph Expo is really an insurance policy for your survival over next five years in a very competitive industry.
That sums where I’m at 10 days before the show. I look forward to your comments.
Bill Lamparter
Industry Analyst
PrintCom Consulting Group
After traveling around the world and seeing what is going on in the industry, it's clear to me that dynamic, personalized and customized communications have gone mainstream. Marketers are asking for it. Agencies are designing it and print service providers are producing it. I look forward to talking with customers at Graph Expo about where they’re going and what’s possible now that we’ve acquired XMPie. In the spirit of taking personalized communications to the next level, I’m curious, what unique cross media publishing applications have you seen?
Larry Zusman
Workflow Marketing Manager
Xerox Production Systems Group
Having been to Chicago and the Graph Expo Show many times in my career, you would think that some of the excitement would wear off. But every year, I look forward to the show and learning about the latest new technology and meeting with customers, analysts and the press – many of whom are also friends. The industry always tries to make a big splash at Graph Expo, and this year will be no different.
We’re bringing our Premier Partners together on Monday, Oct. 16, to network, share knowledge and hear from top industry leaders and many of their peers. Anne Mulcahy, Xerox’s chairman and CEO, will spend some time with us. We’re going to capture the content right here, live, on the In The Balance blog, so the extended graphic communications industry can participate virtually. This isn’t just a bunch of Xeroids hawking our wares. We really try to take an industry approach. Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the agenda:
--Keynote speaker Bo Burlingham, editor at large, INC Magazine and author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to be Great Instead of Big.
--Peter Muir, president, Bizucate, Inc. , will give tips on helping customers succeed, and how bringing business ideas to your customer on how they can grow their business can be one of your largest business and revenue growth areas. Peter’s also going to lead a panel about making marketing your greatest cash cow.
--Joe Rickard, president, Intellective Solutions , is moderating a panel about identifying and hiring the right salesperson. Joe will focus on how the most successful digital printing companies, regardless of size, are those that employ successful salespeople.
I’m ready for the show and hope you keep checking back and look forward to hearing your comments.
Tom Wetjen
Vice President, Xerox Worldwide Graphic Communications Industry
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