I was out visiting print shops today, and in my travels stopped at a long-time friend’s place. He’s been a printer for maybe 25 years now, and very outspoken about the industry. He’s also a cross between a tradeshop and a retail print shop, but most of his customers are print sales reps from other companies who don’t have a decent digital offering.
I walked in on a conversation he was having with a print broker on the phone. It went something like this:
Print broker: I’m bringing in that job you quoted for me last week, the label job.
Printer: I didn’t quote a label job for you. I quoted a postcard job, is that it?
Print broker: Well, it’s not a postcard, it should have been quoted on label stock.
Printer: I have the specs here from what you told me, you said 110lb cover. I can quote it as label stock.
Print broker: I can’t go back to the customer, I’ll already gave her a price. Can’t you just throw in the label stock at no charge?
At this point, the printer got very animated in his conversation with the print broker. Just throwing it in was not an option, and either the print broker or the customer would need to bear the cost, but it was not going to be the printer.
After I wrote the Fungus Among Us post last week, I got a wonderful email from Mary Beth Smith, VP of Sales at Alphagraphics in North Dallas, Texas. She is the founder of a great group on LinkedIn called Girls Who Print (and you don’t have to be a girl to join it!) and she shared with me a video that should ring true to all of us printers out there: http://vendorclientvideo.com/.
In our own business dealings, do we ask vendors to “just throw it in,” not realizing the cost associated with it? We all want to help our customer out, but at what cost? Nearly every printer I’ve gone to visit in the last 90 days is struggling to survive, and it won’t take many orders for “stuff thrown in” to put someone out of business.
For our Social Print Experiment, we’ve had the same experiences, and we’ve not been the best at toeing the line, either. Helping them “just this once” has not brought repeat business, just repeat grief. (I say this after unwiring and re-wiring a wire-o project where the customer upgraded the cover after the job was done, and all she could do was demand to know where her job was every hour of the day, and that somehow it was my fault for not knowing she wanted a heavier cardstock, even though she didn’t spec it).
And what was the outcome of the conversation above? The printer said if the print broker couldn’t get the customer to understand why the price was different, then the print broker didn’t need that kind of customer. And if the print broker wasn’t willing to have that conversation and couldn’t pay for the difference out of his own pocket, then the printer didn’t need him as a customer, either.
Your thoughts?
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
As a printer myself – completely agree with your and your friends opinion. we started from scratch in 2007 and made same mistakes, and nowadays it is not uncommon that such brokers go out of business in quite short time and then next question is how you protect your company cashflow. Now we are sticking with slogan I read somewhere – “in God we trust, others pay in advance! ” Keep it up!
Andrew, thanks for the shout-out! You’re doing such a great job of describing our world. I cringed with your printer friend as I read about the conversation.
We have all “thrown it in” for customers who don’t throw anything back for us, and we all learn the hard way that we have to stand our ground to keep our customer list clear of “fake customers” to make room for the REAL customers. It’s a basic sales principle – Qualify, Qualify, Qualify!!
Look forward to your next installment!
As a Print for Pay sales rep working for a digital printing equipment manufacturer, I’d like to keep the 30,000 foot perspective. While I work exclusively with printers, the sales reps I work alongside sell to real estate offices, doctors, lawyers, etc. They sell less expensive solutions in the “business color/quality” category while I mostly quote “production color” (of course I can sell copiers for the front office too). While my colleagues enjoy higher and sometimes list selling prices and click contracts around seven cents for color, I’m pressed to beat my competitors almost give away pricing and forced to battle with my service department to drive clicks down below five cents. Printers also expect a click price to cover an 11×17 (2-up) sheet while that is almost unheard of with business color sales. I am constantly asked to “throw in” VDP software, UV coaters, finishing equipment, etc. on top of my already low or no commission price.
My hope is to shed light on this highly competitive and low profit industry (commercial printing) and allude to the fact that printing sales is not the only part of the industry to witness these “throw it in or lose the sale” scenarios.
that conversation rings bells and horns here most of the time, printing brokers lurking in the market can’t even count their fingers and they put the prices themselves without real calculations and try to force u to live with it, result, poor quality, very low profit, destroying the market as printers we used to sell 1000 laminated business cards to customers for around 50 LD, brokers got in the middle between us and the customers competing our prices selling them for 20-25 LD and we had to print those for them for less than 10 LD
hate brokers, they broke the market
Guys,
You are doing an amazing thing! Being bold and hugely optimistic in attempting your original goal 1 mill gross sales in 12 months. I’m still waiting for financials. Is anyone getting paid? What about all the overhead expenses, auto, water, electricity, etc….. From what I see your average monthly sales are barely covering cost of equipment, oh yeah, what about paper? The reality I see is that you are operating within an “experiment”; vendors are more than happy to spend time and energy helping at every turn; initial start-up funds came from somewhere, banks in our area would run from this model. Anyway, I do wish you all the best and hope for those big customers to find their way to your door step sooner than later. From all appearances your efforts deserve a reward.
Regards,
Peter
We’ve been meeting with our Outright partners, and they are close to having the API finished that will allow us to display our financials. But, you are correct when you say our sales barely cover our costs. We are not taking a salary from the shop, and obviously working from social media as our sole means of bringing business in is not working.
Feet on the street is what we’re concentrating on most now, and it is starting to pay off. We picked up a new account worth about $60,000 a year that will start using us in June, and another new business venture may bring us another $300,000 this year but at a lower overall profit.
But, as we stated when we started, it’s all an experiment and some things may work while others may not. We’re still working towards $1 million in sales by the end of our first 12 months…