Fixing Flawed Sategies

In my 15 years in this industry, I’ve observed two critical issues that printing companies need to overcome to improve operations and profitability.

First, up until maybe five years ago, it would be fair to say that in many printing companies, the salesperson was the single point of contact for the client. That created a situation where one person—the salesperson—often made more money than the company on a particular job. That’s crazy!

Clearly, times have changed, and for good reason. Although they continue to be very important today, salespeople do not own the customer. If a company wants to grow profitably, then multiple contact points are required to reinforce the service relationship with customers.

Next, the “build it and they will come” strategy must go. Buying equipment in the hope of filling it with jobs has been a leading cause of the overcapacity and pricing pressure we’re experiencing today in some segments of the printing industry, notably commercial print. When times get tough, such as they are now, the thinking is “lower prices to keep the presses running—at any cost.”

At Transcontinental, we have developed a different approach to ensure our long-term success. First, in several recent cases we’ve replaced two or three older press lines with one new, more efficient one. The focus of these moves is always to improve efficiency rather than add capacity.

Two, we help our customers with workflows so they can cut their costs internally or, in some instances, outsource part of their work to us. We now do a lot of premedia work for our customers.

And three, we develop, then offer customers more printing and value-added services before and after the printing itself, so they deal with fewer suppliers and get a lower, aggregated price from us. After all, the more touch points we have in their supply chain, the more valuable we become to them.

As printing firms transform themselves into business communications service providers by offering such value-added services, those services can become an increasingly large part of their revenues while also offering the promise of higher margins. Successfully selling value-added services prompts a dramatic change in business models, forcing us to move beyond understanding our clients’ needs, toward anticipating the needs of consumers, our customers’ customers.

At Transcontinental, to better assume our role as a consultant and partner, we’ve developed a market-team approach: We divide our sales representatives by market sector so that they can become experts in that market, advising clients of industry trends and consumer tendencies.

By doing so, we move beyond being a simple commodity supplier. Instead, we strengthen and cement our role as marketing advisor and business partner to our customers, whether they are corporations, publishers or major financial institutions.

At Transcontinental, we know everything we do is a work in progress, and that we have much work ahead of us. But it’s our strong passion and commitment for what we do that keeps the journey so interesting.