Business Management - Marketing/Sales

Truly successful marketing communications campaigns begin with a highly creative and brilliant idea. But many campaigns fail to build a really interested following among even the marketer’s best customers. To increase a marketing campaign’s chances of success, consider a few quick questions to see how you can improve your next launch.

The better you know your customers, the better you can market to them. Printing companies that keep accurate and thorough customer and prospect databases can target different customers with cross- and up-selling offers they’re more likely to be interested in based on the buying interests they’ve shown.

After what is likely to be years, you finally hit seven figures in annual sales, and perhaps even multiple times over. You’ve made it. You’re at the top. Now what? Sure, you know that you are supposed to keep selling.

Despite all of our exquisite, second-generation communications, nothing can match the impression we make—or hope to make—face to face. Whether it’s for social relationships or business ones, I contend we have our best shot at building rapport when we meet someone in person.

Raising Prices? Think your customers will notice? Printers can learn a ton from the recent Netflix price increase. Netflix is taking a gamble with a bunch of loyal, but less profitable, customers. No one knows how many will walk.

Last time I checked, there was significantly more interest in developing new customers through direct sales and related marketing than any other topic in the print-media and general business markets. Let’s now jump forward beyond the customer onboarding trajectory and assume we have a stable new-business strategy to launch our program.

Database marketing depends on the creation, development and use of customer and prospect databases to strengthen relationships with these businesses. Effective marketing begins with a comprehensive database, so train employees to gather information at various touch points.

“I am tired and stressed. The phone is not ringing. Tough day. Very discouraged.” That was the message I recently read from one of my training clients. Had he called instead of e-mailing, I would have offered the following advice

There’s such a widespread lack of knowledge among consumers when it comes to printing. In my mind, every businessperson and independent professional could use personal printed materials. Online printers are the natural go-to resource, but so are small commercial printers.

Tracking your printing company’s sales efforts can provide lots of useful data, including total cost per sales hour and value of each rep’s sales call. This data then can be used to motivate your salesforce and justify hiring new employees.