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More About Digital Leaders
October 4, 2007

Last time we talked about how digital leaders are better at selling their new services, mastering the workflow, acquiring the database and finding, hiring and keeping the right people. Here is a little more about that subject.

Based on our experience and research we conclude that many traditional sales people who have mastered the transactional sales approach are not motivated or good at the consultative / problem solving sales approach needed for a variety of digital products including variable data printing. This reminds me of one of the key points in Jim Collins great book “Good to Great” which is you need to have the right people on the bus (staff in your company) and they need to be in the right seats (doing the right jobs).

Often that means that most of your sales force are performing well selling your traditional products and services and some are not. In the “Good to Great” bus analogy that may mean that some people have to get off your bus and replaced by new people who will be asked to sit in new seats, in this case seats dedicated to digital sales and/or service.

Mastering workflows is another feature leaders are better at. Based on some open ended questions in our research we learned that a challenge with new workflows today is integrating different components. This includes web to print and variable data systems with digital printing front ends and existing MIS systems. Although most companies struggle with these same issues, we believe that the leaders are better at overcoming the integration issues then the laggards

In addition, many companies reported difficulty in finding or creating the databases needed for variable data campaigns. We believe that the leaders are better at acquiring and/or building databases. There are new technologies emerging that help to address this problem. The best example are Personalized URL or PURLs. These are unique web pages that you drive people to visit with emails or direct mail. Once they arrive on the landing page they are asked to fill in personal information which then creates the database.

And the biggest surprise of our research was that leaders were better at HR issues or recruiting, hiring and keeping the right people. Using a professional sports analogy we could say that the leaders have better scouts, “farm teams” and offer a premium to keep the veteran players.

If your interested in hearing more about the NAPL Digital Leader research, Andy and I will offering a free webinar on this subject Wednesday, October 10th, from 2:00 to 3:00 pm EDT for What They Think. The registration page is
http://members.whattheythink.com/home/webinarregistrationform.cfm

Posted by Howie Fenton on October 4, 2007 | Comments (0)