Get ahead of the pack without compromising your price!

This series captures the unique challenges that sign companies, designers and ultimately, their customers, sometimes have to face in a hurry as the deadline approaches and the quick Google search only leads to dead ends. With hands-on tips and tricks from industry experts, we set out to create a library of solutions to un-googleable issues.

In this, the third and final part of this series, we will have a look at the current market and provide strategies for small print houses to get ahead of their competitors without having to compromise their pricing. Many marketing and business strategy books have been written about this topic, so it is to no surprise that a short article cannot possibly cover all angles here. We will, therefore, focus on the most relevant and applicable ones and finish off with a list of books for a deep-dive.

Many business owners have stumbled into the trap of price reduction or excessive flash sales and offers. Whilst this often-used tactic can bring short-term relief, it rarely helps the long-term success of any business. With the following three approaches to marketing and sales, print businesses can find their niche, create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant.

Strategy 1:
Filter your customers

One of the proven theories around the customer journey in almost any business category is the implementation of a sales filter. What this means is that in order to create more efficiency throughout the sales process as well as overall happier customers and more revenue, it is important to tailor your sales funnel towards your ideal customer.  Which jobs come with the biggest profit margins? Which ones are the easiest with the least back and forth? How often can your business realistically get a customer to return? What is the life-time value of  this customer?

This seems obvious so far. The part that is often overlooked is the customers themselves. How likely can you fulfil their need? How easy can you make it for them to get what they came for? The basic idea here is to find out from the get-go if your business and the potential account are a good match for each other. Being able to categorise customers quickly and, for example, find out if they are just price-shopping or looking for a valuable business relationship can help you fine-tune your sales process and save time that is better spent working for your ideal customers.

Strategy 2:
Be of service

As obvious and self-explanatory as it seems, this is not as easy as many think. Between actively selling, writing quotes, sending out invoices, answering phones, overseeing existing accounts and current jobs as well as quality control it can be hard sometimes to try and set yourself apart through exceptional customer service. But in a more and more globalised world where almost anything can be compared and ordered online, the one thing that can give businesses an edge is their customer service.

It helps to create strict processes, and tweak them over time until everyone in your company follows the same steps every time a potential customer approaches. An exemplary level of customer service can be achieved through short response times, actively listening to the customer’s needs, thinking outside the box when custom solutions are needed and showing great attention to detail in the production
of a project.

Strategy 3:
Offer solutions

Another way of alleviating your brand and services is to create solutions instead of offers. At first, the difference between selling a product and selling a solution may not be apparent -- after all, aren’t most products created to solve problems? But there’s a difference. Products are made to be useful for the biggest audience. Solutions, however, are designed to help your ideal customer every step of the way, ensuring that your customer’s unique problems are solved. If you begin to treat sales like customer service, you can create true value for your potential accounts and will not compete on pricing alone anymore. With this step, it becomes apparent that finding the ideal customer is very closely related to finding your niche. But it’s not the thing you are best at that you should be looking for. It’s the product or service that your ideal customer wants. If you can identify this element, and refine your whole sales, marketing and customer service (and even aftermarket service) towards it, you are most likely to raise the bar and rise above your competition.

Further resources

If you’d like to read more about these topics, I suggest the following books:

•  Blue Ocean Stragegy by W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne

•   This is Marketing by Seth Godin

•   Buyer Personas by Adele Revella

Sue Haefner is a regular contributor for Digital Image Magazine.  She is the editor of creativecoast.blog, an Australian blog about graphic design and its related industries. She holds a MA in Creative Direction and has worked both in Germany and Australia as a graphic designer and copywriter.