How To Add Service-Based Revenue Streams

Who are those printers adding services they can charge for? You hear and read about them, and the types of services they’re adding, but you’re frustrated. Where do they find the time and money to even look into adding other services? How do they decide what services to add?

It may be easier to just keep on keeping on, as they say; but if you aren’t looking at expanding your services beyond print, you may be severely limiting your prospects for the future.

How To Begin?

Get advice from your regular customers first. The point is, don’t add a mailing or fulfillment service just because your brother-in-law has extra space and a few man hours to spare in his warehouse.

Talk to your regular, repeat customers—the ones you have close relationships with—and find out what services they need. Don’t wait until you’ve made an investment in mailing and fulfillment services to find out that your regular customers won’t need you for that type of work.

If you are big enough to have your own sales team, it’s critical to teach them to identify customer needs that may not even be apparent to the customers themselves.

“Sometimes,” said Frank Loversky, president of Tools4Media and a veteran graphic arts consultant and integrator who also served as president of corporate sales for Saxotech Inc., “the customer will call your salesperson and ask for what may seem like disparate requests, unrelated to each other and unrelated to printing. These are often opportunities for the printer to fulfill a broader spectrum of needs for customers and the customer’s customers.” Additional services to consider include Web-to-print, content and/or digital asset management, mailing and fulfillment, and database publishing. These various pieces might be defined as a marketing toolbox.

If you are scratching your head, thinking, “this isn’t me,” because your customers are not asking for other services, it may be because you are not talking to the right person inside the organization. A print buyer may not be in the loop with what the head of marketing or operations needs. Having a marketing toolbox—a range of options—for salespeople to use as they cultivate relationships with their customers may be the best way to add services over time.

You can find the person or persons who do require those services, or teach your contact about gathering that information inside their organization. Many companies don’t realize that these seemingly unrelated requirements are not only best-managed by a communications organization like yours, but can be made much more cost-effective when handled—and eventually streamlined and automated—by one supplier, like yourself.

One of Loversky’s customers is Franklin Press of Baton Rouge. A salesman for Franklin was fortunate, Loversky said, when Vice President Craig Chumney accompanied him on a call. The customer asked for something that seemed out of the range of Franklin’s services, at least to the salesperson. But Chumney said he would get the job done, and Franklin did.

Loversky noted this situation magnifies the need to empower salespeople. “Of course they can’t go out and offer the world,” he explained, “but they should think of everything as a possibility. Entrepreneurs and owners of businesses say yes and then figure out how to provide the service or product when they go back to the office. Salespeople need to know you are willing to do that.”

“We’ll talk to production, marketing and C-level people in the organization,” said Scott Pellicone, vice president of business development for Worldcolor Premedia. “I typically go in with the print sales rep and represent the digital supply chain. It’s all about differentiation. We try to understand what they need and try to plug in our solutions to fit their culture if it makes sense, and find ways they can take advantage of a lot of solutions.”

Pellicone noted that these are multi-touch types of sales, where he or his colleagues go in via production and get into the Web commerce division, or perhaps go top down and start with a CFO who wants to reduce costs.

Of course, most printers can’t add services at the drop of a dime. But what you can do, and what many industry experts recommend, is to outsource the special service until you find—or don’t find—that it will be a money-maker for you. At that point you can think about making an investment.

In this Economy?

Well, it so happens you are in luck—while you were busy running your presses and digital printers over the past ten years, technology developers were pulling heavy, expensive operation software and hardware apart to create small, light, easy to use and integrate modules that allow you to choose what kinds of functions you want to add to your operation.

And while they were creating modules for things like RIPping, image editing, imposition, preflight and Web-to-print, they were also automating them.

Today you can pick and choose what you want, and need, a la carte, and much more economically. (Yes, we’re talking about reducing six figures to five and four.)

Watch out for the big V-A-S

No, it’s not another industry acronym. It’s value-add services, and while these are integral and crucial to getting, and keeping, business, it’s imperative that you learn to separate services that you offer at no charge from those that legitimately cost you money.

Pellicone said his company “rolls what may be perceived to be value-add services” into the total solutions package. For this larger organization, which has been providing services such as asset management for Avon and Victoria’s Secret for almost a decade, coming to terms with what the company should invoice was learned over the years.

Their experience is your gain, however. For instance, Pellicone said that content management warrants a monthly fee based on storage, and that the pricing is tiered so that the entry point is not significant based on return.

Another example is Franklin. The company currently generates most of its revenue from “putting ink or toner on paper,” Chumney said, but the acquisition of a data processing and direct mail company 13 years ago evolved into a value add across all of Franklin’s services. It’s a value-add that Chumney feels will eventually drive most of the company’s growth.

To facilitate that positive movement, Franklin recently integrated DMP FLO Suite, a marketing toolbox for publishers, printers and their stakeholder partners. Chumney said that incorporating DMP’s FLO Suite has allowed Franklin to control the two traditional bottlenecks in their workflow: prepress and data processing. “By automating (these functions) we are able to turn work around more quickly and accurately, thereby adding value.”

No Need To Lurk

There’s no need to be afraid of asking other printers how they are “doing it.” The old tenet that had printers remaining close-mouthed regarding their equipment acquisitions for competitive reasons is completely irrelevant in a global economy. In the old days, location was the strong competitive differentiator.

In an age of real time turnaround and delivery, geographic location has taken a nosedive. Today, cost, service and quality easily beat out relationship and location advantages.

Helene Cohen Smith’s firm, HSPR, provides communications consulting to major international companies in the publishing and imaging sectors.