MARKETING 4 DIGITAL: Variable Data's 'It' Factor

To sell variable data, you've got to have It. As someone who sold traditional print for many years before migrating to digital products, I think the main difference is that traditional print salespeople are at the very end of the decision-making process—who's going to print the job for us. Their world revolves around manufacturing: quality of print, delivery, cost-competitiveness, understanding of prepress/production issues, paper stock, etc.

A digital salesperson who gets It has to have a different business model. They really help to create the products they're selling—almost like a detective, uncovering the key issues of their client's marketing problems.

Examples of these problems include sales volume, customer retention, cross-selling and up-selling. A print salesperson has to think like a marketer rather than a manufacturer, which is a big difference. Not every print sales rep has that capability because such a client interview involves far more variables than a printing project.

Traditional salespeople are used to only worrying about the print buyer. Here's the disk, here's the file, upload it to your FTP site, it's a done deal. But in the print marketing environment (which I'm classifying as those who get It), you need a different mindset. You have to think beyond the print buyer for the client to the other people who may be involved, and you have to know when you need to step up to the plate and offer a solution.

In a variable-data print (VDP) project, for example, there may be a number of departments that are key to the creation of the product from the client side: creative, marketing, Web people, etc.

A big issue for many companies is IT: “Oh, we'll never be able to get that database out of our IT people,” or “The database is a mess.” The print marketer steps up and says, “We can take care of that for you,” beginning to draw out these other services. It's really a different hat.

If you're looking to hire people along those lines, you need somebody who, in some capacity (not necessarily print), has been involved in providing a solution, preferably with a variety of components to it. You're actually engineering a product for your clients in the VDP markets; the same goes for PURLs and Web-to-print. It's more difficult for the salespeople who haven't been in that problem-solving environment to understand those issues.

One tactic I ended up using at the company I worked at was to become the internal digital guru. I would go along with the traditional print salesperson to meet with clients, helping uncover these issues and create the products.

That did two things: To the traditional salesperson, it gave a level of comfort because there was someone who really understood the issues along with them. To the client, it demonstrated the depth of resources at the print provider's disposal to solve its issues or deliver a better product or service.

I found that if you did that enough times, the salespeople would learn a lot just from listening to the presentations, stories and mechanics of the process over and over again. Often, then, they would assume more and more of the responsibility of the project development and discovery process. That's the salesperson who gets It, finding a way to make your company useful to the client.