Business Management - Marketing/Sales

There's A dirty little secret among some of the country's largest printers. It's not something they all want their competitors to know. And it has to do with the most overlooked part of the print stream. Their secret? The bindery can sell print jobs. Traditionally, the bindery was seen only as a necessary evil, the unpopular room tucked in a corner of the plant, where the product was finished once all the "real work" of designing and printing was done. Print buyers would look for companies with the most advanced prepress areas and pressrooms, and then expect that the product would be cut, folded

A senior manager of a large printing equipment manufacturer called me back in July. He was inviting me to speak to his U.S. sales force at Graph Expo in Chicago this month. The speech was to be only 30 minutes, and I was going to Graph Expo anyway, so I said, "sure." Now, of course, I'm known as "old rhetoric breath," and I can talk about anything for 30 minutes. I can give you 30 minutes on the best timing, the breathtaking beauty and the proper execution of the suicide-squeeze bunt in baseball. In a half-hour, I can easily discuss the virtues of North

A few issues back, I wrote a column about how I'm golf impaired. It's actually worse than that. I'm golf challenged. In fact, I don't play the game, period. I do garden and, because I'm out in the sun, people think I have a golfer's tan. I'm 57, I have a tan and I'm an investment banker to the printing industry.

On the last day of June, I attended an out-of-town cocktail reception and dinner with about 20 printing company owners. June 30th was my 57th birthday, and the printers presented me a birthday cake, an XXL baseball warm-up jacket and a baseball cap. Of course, they asked me if I'd made a wish before I blew out the candles. One printer guessed that I had wished for about six more printing industry consolidators, since I'm in the investment banking business of representing the sellers of printing companies. More consolidators would mean more competition for the companies that I represent. That would have been a selfish

In my March 1999 column, I included a print salesperson survey and promised to send a magic "sales power" paperweight to everyone who completed and mailed in the survey. I hope I never weaken and make this kind of offer again. The mailman has been bringing in bags of surveys, and I am bone-tired from wrapping these little boxes. Furthermore, in a post-column wave of euphoric largess, I decided to send every survey respondent a Sean McArdle audio tape and my book, "Now Get Out There and Sell Something!" So, this whole stupid survey idea has cost me a bunch of money, and I had to tabulate

This column is way out on the edge. It falls in the category of "experimental prose." It has not been approved for general use by any government agencies. As a matter of fact, if you are . . . 1. pregnant; 2. suffering from high blood pressure; 3. wearing mittens to prevent thumb sucking; 4. wearing mittens to prevent scratching your eyes out; or 5. wearing a straight jacket . . . then, you probably should excuse yourself from this column now. Come to think of it, if you are reading this from a hospital bed, ring the nurse button now and have this magazine incinerated with the medical

We are all at risk of staying too long. Whether as a guest or in a business meeting or even, I suppose, as a columnist. Knowing when it's time to leave may be no less important for columnists than it is for boxers and ballplayers. For me, that time has come. I haven't lost a step, and I'm still at the top of my game. But nothing erodes desire and competence faster than the loss of motivation. I have sold my business. Confident that my former clients are now in the strong and very capable hands of Charlotte Seligman, my colleague of many years, I am

The printing industry never gets any publicity in the national media. Television, magazines and newspapers ignore us. It's as if commercial printing didn't exist. The graphic arts industry gets no attention or respect. If I'm not mistaken, we are something like the third largest employer and the seventh or eighth largest industry in terms of the dollar value of our production. I think I'm about right. You can look it up. The technology sector gets tremendous coverage on television and in newspapers. Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Sun MicroSystems and all those Internet companies get lots of press. Cocktail party conversations abound with tales of fortunes

I don't know about you, but the Gallup people have never, never, never called me for my thoughts on any national issue. I have never been polled by anybody. Not "CNN," Time, Newsweek, USA Today—nary any national media pollster or political party pollster has called me. Hey, I'm in the phone book. I've even got an e-mail address. I file and pay my taxes every year. I'm a registered Republican voter. I've got credit cards, and all the catalogers have my name and address. I'm not hidin'! The pollsters can damnsure find me! No one has asked me to rate the president's performance or that of

I used to provide advice about how to develop marketing programs in the fall, when most printers were developing their plans for programs to be launched in January. Today, there is no longer a single time of the year when marketing and sales executives write their plans. New programs are likely to be launched in almost any month. In companies with fiscal years that vary from the calendar, annual budgets may kick in on July 1 or September 1. Newly acquired companies and additional capabilities also frequently lead to the development of new marketing programs in the middle of the fiscal year. So February is