Jon Tolley of Prime Group.
Jon Bailey from ProCo and Jon Tolley from Prime Group answered questions at a North Print & pack seminar regarding how printers can implement and leverage web to print technology to make money.
Question: Where should you start with web to print?
Jon Bailey: One of the big learning curves we went through was to start at the back end of the process and work back to the start. This may involve changing the mindset of you and your company, and you also need to analyse what your customers need and how you can fit it in to your company.
Q: Do you start with the customers first?
Jon Tolley: In general yes. Just because it is new, it doesn’t mean you need to have it. Sixty percent of companies fail because they don’t know what they need.
JB: Don’t do anything that is not about the customer. Use the relationship with your customers to see if they would use the technology.
Q: How receptive are customers to this?
JT: It takes a long time to hone the skills of how to communicate this to the customer properly. Do your research. It will be more effective to make them understand how it can work for them.
JB: Define web to print in your own mind, as people have their own ideas about what it is. Also, do not give it away for free. This will cheapen the product and then it will most likely not be used anyway.
Q: What’s the most important thing you have learned from this process?
JB: Not transforming the business into something it’s not. We are still a print company and that is important to our customers. It has allowed us to get a lot of cheap, low value jobs through the business very fast and make money on it. We also freed up four to five hours a day of people’s time to develop the business and not take orders all day.
JT: In our first year alone of live production, we made an addition of £178,000 of revenue and freed up bottlenecks in the business.
Q: Was going through the process useful in evaluating the business?
JB: I think so. For us in 2004 it was the right time to go into web to print. But it does give you a different mindset – not just about the kit, but the process around printing and finishing as well. If you can get rid of that cost you can make more money.
JT: The relationship with the customer changes. You become a lot more valued by yourcustomer and can deliver significant value back to them.
Jon Bailey from ProCo
Q: Have your sales people adapted to how to sell this to client?
JB: It’s really difficult because you are taking them in a different direction. You have to look at how you compensate. You cannot just say, get this order and we will give you a big cheque. It’s a totally different sell. They need help, training and education. They are smart people but you need to invest in them. At the start you see them over-selling it: QR codes, everything linking straight into a retail system, all for 5K. There’s an education process.
JT: It’s moving from a transactional sell to a customer sell. That’s difficult for traditional sales people.
JB: Things take time to move but they should still move. It’s not a case of: ‘Don’t expect anything from me for six months.’ There are lots of things in the process – scoping for example – that you should charge for.
Q: What’s the key thing you have learned about web to print?
JB: Quite a few things! If you think back to when you were starting a print business, you did small steps. This is no different. It’s adding value to your business. Get up, have a go, make it small at the start, talk to some friendlies, and see if it can work.
JT: Research, research and research again, all areas of your business and your customers. What does web to print do for your customers? When you get that bit right, the rest is easy.
