SALESCALL: The Best Print Industry Ad Ever!

Did you go to Graph Expo? I am on a plane at the time of this writing and trying to come to grips with the events of three days of mental mayhem. Graph Expo is sensory overload. Your ears ring, your feet and back ache, and three days of kissing hands and shaking babies leaves you pining to get back to whining employees and irrational clients.

Multiple it by 10, take away the yummy (and I am being EXTREMELY sarcastic here) food, stuff yourself into a hotel room smaller than most walk-in closets and you have drupa (coming up next year). But anywho, back to the point I was attempting to make, already in progress ….

The Show Daily print magazine, put out by my beloved GAM, had a centerpage ad from Ricoh/IBM that I fell in love with the moment I saw it. And it instantly became my all-time favorite print industry ad. I so wish that I could reprint it alongside this month's column, but I can't so I will do the next best thing. Here's the headline:

IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT PRINTERS ANYMORE. IT'S ABOUT IDEAS.

Isn't that brilliant? Do you get it? Do you see the simple genius in this message? Do you understand this call for a quantum change in thinking?

Yes! Yes! Yes! Let me take their concept and scream it out from Mount InfoPrint, adding my own interpretation: The printing industry is no longer about iron.

I'll break this to you with the quiet, gentle manner of the skilled communicator that I am: Your equipment doesn't matter. It's beige and uses electricity. It does not make you different from your competition. What make you different from this point forward, what will drive your success, and what will keep you in business are your ideas. It is about ideas! Read those four words over and over again—then get out of printing and get into ideas. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, your future depends on four little words. Heed them or die. Subtle, huh?

Of the many challenges our sales people face—differentiation, price competition, customer loyalty, and the inability to sell digital/VDP effectively to name just four—approaching them as a printing sales person would result in failure whereas an ideas sales person would succeed. Yet we are locked in a “you-need-any-printing?” business model that worked yesterday but continues to fail today. Simply doing more of it is not the right solution. An attitude shift that embraces the “It's about ideas” mantra is The Way. If you sell on price, you will lose. If you sell on ideas, you cannot lose. You are bulletproof. Bulletproof!

The Show Daily had page after page of products and services from the usual suspects. Some begged the reader to visit a booth and hear about their latest and greatest. Yet the best ad in the bunch sold not a thing. It simply made a suggestion that few readers grasped.

I was so thrilled with their ad that I immediately went over to the Ricoh/IBM booth and demanded to see the Marketing Communications people. The booth babe up front thought I was going to yell at someone, but when I told her my intentions, she immediately identified the responsible parties. Turns out on old friend of mine, Lesley Wylie, snuck over the border from Toronto and had a humble hand in it. Bravo, Lesley! You are a rock star!

See the ad to which the author refers on pages 22 to 23 of this issue.