Web to Print: The Answer to Scale and Product Diversification

Tuesday, June 5, 2012 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm
Speaker: Jennifer Matt, President, Web2Print Experts, Inc.
The web allows you to scale by converting manual, full service interactions to self service/automated interactions. Your customers want to interact with you online; a web to print solution allows you to handle more orders without adding more labor. Product diversification is a must; you can extend your product offering and your reach into existing clients by using web to print to launch additional products and services. You know you’re willing to figure out any challenge the customer throws at you, but how many opportunities are you missing because you don’t promote them online? Come learn why web to print makes sense for scale and product diversification and then how to best approach the transition of moving your business online.

Print Solutions Conference & Expo
www.psda.org/conference
June 4–6, 2012
Baltimore Convention Center
Baltimore, Maryland

The 2012 Print Solutions Conference & Expo is the premier event for distributors of print, marketing and business communications. Join me June 4–6 at the Baltimore Convention Center to stay better informed of emerging trends and best practices, better connected with suppliers and industry partners, better equipped to serve your customers and better positioned in this changing market. Attend to gain insight into new and emerging industry innovations, newly-design educational tracks and three days of rich peer-to-peer networking opportunities. Learn more and register today at www.psda.org/conference.

I wrote a book about Web2Print. All proceeds go to EDSF.org.

HP is printing and distributing it for free at drupa. Pick up a copy if you’re going. I’ll be there May 7-11, hope to run into many blog readers.

If you’re not heading to Germany, no worries. The electronic version of the book will be available from EDSF.org starting May 17 (after drupa).

Understanding online shopper behavior is a key to success in any e-commerce endeavor, web-to-print is no exception (both B2B and B2C).

The online world calls this topic “web analytics” – the guru of this world is Avinash Kaushik, he provides the following helpful definition.

Web Analytics 2.0 is:

the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your website and the competition,

to drive a continual improvement of the online experience that your customers, and potential customers have,

which translates into your desired outcomes (online and offline).

The initial step to understanding shopper behavior is to start collecting, monitoring, and analyzing the clickstream data – that’s the data you can get from free tools like Google Analytics. If your website isn’t collecting clickstream data today, start now. You can’t begin your learning about Web Analytics without the foundational clickstream data.

If you have web-to-print stores deployed, add Google Analytics to them as well. Demand it of your vendor. There is a lot to learn about doing business on the web, the first step is to start becoming data driven.

The clickstream data helps you analyze your sites behavior; visits, visitors, time on site, page views, bounce rate, sources of your traffic, etc. The web provides a wealth of information about how your customers/potential customers are interacting with you – if you’re not taking advantage of this data; you’re operating just like you did offline (guessing).

Request your people to provide daily stats on all your web to print stores – just the act of focusing people on the empirical data will change their behavior. The goal of any e-commerce solution is traffic and conversion. Everything you do online should be focusing on increasing traffic (visitors) and conversion (transactions).

It’s shocking to me that we as an industry and web-to-print as an offering to this industry isn’t more focused on the topic of Web Analytics. I think there is room for a disruptive web-to-print offering which focuses on what the rest of the e-commerce world is focusing on, Web Analytics.

Printers need help from a web-to-print solution and company who can demonstrate their ability to not only track, monitor, and analyze web analytical data but also help printers determine the actionable results of that data.

Most printers see web-to-print stores as something they launch and forget about. This is a recipe for low adoption and wasted resources. A store is an evolving offer; you get what you put into it. Start with monitoring the clickstream data today.

When is the last time you told a prospect your solution (product/service) is not a fit for their particular need?

If you claim to sell solutions, this has to happen. If you’ve never done this, you’re not selling solutions, your selling your product/service to anyone who will listen to your pitch.

Your product can’t be the solution to every single customer need you uncover. Don’t you think this is the resistance to solution selling overall? Sales has a very hard time NOT selling. If you truly listen to the customer (diagnose) before you start selling your solution (prescribe) – you’re going to uncover things that have absolutely nothing to do with your solution.

What do you do with that discovery? You have just uncovered an unmet need of the customer – this is a valuable piece of information. What’s your next move?

Unfortunately the most common response to this scenario is to force it. Sales refuses to accept there isn’t a fit and they force the need into their solution. They use their selling skills and make it seem like the product was built to solve that exact problem. Sales feels a temporary win, everyone behind sales is set up to fail (operations, technology, and the customer).

What amazes me is how often this happens; and because there is a short term gain (top line revenue); nobody looks at the long-term pain. How do you create an incentive plan that drives sales behavior to find relevant needs that your products and services were built to solve? If that is your goal, your sales team has to have the courage to admit when something doesn’t fit. The goal of sales isn’t to sell everything; the goal of sales is to find needs that you can solve with your existing suite of products and services.

What should your sales team do with this valuable information about customer’s unmet needs? The number one way to build trust in a sales role is to truly be solution focused – even if that solution isn’t your product or service. If you know of a product/service that can meet the customer’s need – a referral at this point builds trust in both directions. The customer trusts you because you’re not trying to force them to buy your solution, the company you refer to trusts you and will be more likely to refer your product when it’s a good fit.

I know it sounds a bit altruistic, but the alternative is so painful. Too many implementations are setup to fail out the gate because there wasn’t a good match between customer need and product solution. No amount of implementation magic can change that equation; it always results in lots of frustration on both sides (customer and vendor).

More and more I find there is no need to build solutions from the ground up. We don’t need to construct from scratch, we need to assemble the appropriate puzzle pieces to solve the problem at hand.

When we try to build vs. assemble, we learn a lot, but it has a huge opportunity cost in the form of time and labor and even more importantly – we delay our ability to get to market. Timing is more important than 100% control.

Assembling puzzles means we need to partner more than hire or build. We need to be open to what the web 2.0 software world calls a mashup; a combination of several technologies (potentially from different providers) to solve a user problem.

For printers this might mean, partnering with another printer who already has the necessary equipment until you build the volumes to warrant the investment yourself. This approach is so much saner; you get to learn the economics of this new product offering while you’re shopping for the equipment. You’ll know the exact right time to pull the trigger based on volumes, internal expertise, and customer demand. What a great way to enter a new product space by eliminating the stress of losing money the first few quarters trying to pay for the equipment lease and the additional staff.

From a software perspective, partnering allows you to offer new features/functionality without having to build it yourself. Borrow from what others are good at to create a complete product offering for your customers. Remember to invest time and effort on both the technical and business integration. Don’t make your customers work too hard at either – the two solutions should act as one, both technically and from a business standpoint.

We have a dilemma.

Prospects (the people you’re selling to) base purchasing decisions on perceived value, typically interpreted as “more is better.”

Customers (people using your product) make customer satisfaction opinions based on usability, where “less is better.”

How does a product manager serve both sides of the dilemma? Entice the prospects and satisfy the existing customers?

How do you as a shopper make decisions based on what’s good for your long term satisfaction rather than your miss-perception of value = more?

Virtually every software product development cycle I’ve been a part of in the last two decades has centered on a single topic; add more features. Our efforts resulted in two outcomes; short term sales (the sales team could continue to say “yes” to more features), and a long term decrease in our product’s overall usability.

Every single feature you add to a product, even if nobody ever uses it, adds complexity and could potentially get in the way of someone trying to accomplish something. This is why documentation and online help inside software applications has ballooned to 1,000s of pages. Who has the time to commit to this level of learning curve? What product is worth this much work?

This isn’t an easy dilemma.

I have some suggestions. Instead of thinking about your product or service offering through the single lens of “add more” let’s add two more views into how to make your product/service more appealing.

1) Simplify

2) Remove

What could you re-factor, clean up; improve, simplify to decrease the complexity of your product?

What features could you outright remove?

Blasphemy – I know, removing features, are you crazy Jennifer? Do you want me to put that in a press release? We removed 40 features! Back in 2006 Mercedes-Benz removed more than 600 features from its cars because they realized more was getting in the way of what was really important.

I believe we are seeing a shift in buying habits; no doubt that Apple has been a huge influencer in this area. Usability is coming into the buying discussion. I recently bought a heart rate monitor; I searched Google for “simplest heart rate monitor” and found one that bragged about how little it did! I had two goals in my purchase, buy a heart rate monitor that monitored my heart rate accurately during exercise and did not require me to read a user’s manual to figure it out. Here’s the irony, I would have paid MORE for it to do less in a more usable fashion.

Apple has spoiled us with beautifully usable products; I want Apple to design the following: home/office phone, alarm clock, car, bike computer, home alarm system, camera, essentially every electronic device I use. I don’t own a TV, if Apple comes out with one I might have to join the rest of America and plug in.

Jim Collins’ latest book, Great by Choice is awesome.

Fire bullets, then canon balls.

This is great advice for printers who are moving into the online space. Don’t fire a canon ball (translation = invest in a huge complex system, launch with 1,000s of products, spend 2 years on implementation). Fire a series of bullets and test your assumptions with real empirical data first. (translation = try the subscription model, test with a single customer, try out a few products, learn about web analytics, monitor activity and user adoption, rinse and repeat with what you’ve learned).

Once you nail it, then scale it. (Oh and that’s anther good book)

Bullets are cheap, you can fire lots of them.

Canon balls are expensive, you might only get to fire one that doesn’t work.

Be careful. First define your terms carefully; what is your definition of “customer”? If you’re talking to your front line employees, the customer to them is the individuals whom they interact with everyday. If you’re talking to your sales team, it’s the decision makers who may or may not have a clue what happens day to day with the relationship (other than the internal costs of their labor and the hard costs of your invoices). If you’re asking yourself (the business owner), the customer is that revenue line, hopefully steady and recurring that keeps your business breathing.

Customers don’t want to change.

I hear that a lot when we’re working with print organizations to transition from offline/full service/manual processes to online/self service/automated processes. Everyone jumps to the same conclusion – the individual is worried about their job. I’m not buying that as the only explanation anymore. People have so much to do; I don’t know anyone who isn’t overloaded at work (doing many jobs, juggling many responsibilities).

But there is something that never changes with humans – their desire to feel important. If you approach a transition, especially a manual to automated transition with the wrong message – the human immediately feels less important. Not good for the human, not good for the organization, and almost an immediate “emergency break engagement” to any kind of change efforts.

The statement “my customer doesn’t want that” is an opinion and usually the result of  a limited perspective. For example, when talking about moving order entry or order inquiry out of e-mail or file transfer out of FTP, the response is always the same. It works today, my customer is comfortable with those methods, I can manage it – it’s my job.

Here’s the problem. Inefficiency is a business killer and labor cannot be the answer. People working harder and harder is also a morale killer. People doing more manual tasks opens you up to a world of hurt when inevitable mistakes are made. All of that is important; but we’re missing the most critical factor to this discussion. If you’re using labor to solve process issues and utilizing tools that require multiple touches and lots of back and forth (e-mail, FTP) then guess who is also having to throw labor at it – YOUR CUSTOMER!

Now you’re at risk. Your lack of process and automation are causing unnecessary labor costs for your customers! The final chapter in this story concludes with a competitor pitching the decision makers to replace you with a more advanced/automated process.

Who needs to change first? You or the customer?

There is a lot of talk about printers needing to evolve/transition/change/react to the new landscape of digital media. Nothing wrong with the talk – there is a heck of a lot changing under our feet; no doubt it deserves a response.

One thing I would like printers to consider first is; what are you good at? (If you prefer smart sounding business lingo then what’s your core competency?). I know it sounds simple, obvious, no duh – what are we good at?

But you have to agree that it’s a good starting point for determining where/how/what you’re going to evolve into? You can’t simply run off and jump into the marketing services arena if the only expertises you have on your staff are great print manufacturers (excellent press folks, pre-press, etc…). Please don’t kid yourself, there may be some exceptions but the knowledge/expertise transfer from manufacturing to marketing is not common.

Look at your talent, look deeper than your initial impressions, ask more questions than just assuming you know what individuals are good at because they’ve worked for you for years. Do you know how they engage in digital/social media outside of work? Do you know if they have a personal passion for environmental issues? Could the leader of your green initiative or your social marketing strategy already be sitting in your pre-press department?

What are you good at – as a business and as an individual business leader? Maybe a merger makes sense because you know you absolutely love the manufacturing part of your business and absolutely hate the sales and marketing part? Find a partner that loves what you can’t stand.

What I love about getting older (yes, I said that) –  I love that I keep getting more and more clear about what I’m good at and what I struggle with. It’s a liberating moment, not sure when it happened for me, later than I hoped it would, when I realized I didn’t have to be good at everything. Find what you’re good at and figure out how that can be leveraged in the new digital media world. Find your niche, trying to be something you’re not is a recipe for business disaster and personal unhappiness.

I don’t know of one print business today who isn’t thinking they urgently need to evolve, transition (insert your favorite synonyms for “change”).

I believe there are two types of change, one produces incremental change, and the other produces real change.

My favorite “what not to do example” is what larger companies frequently call “re-organization.” Let me recap, company/business not performing, lets shuffle the people around, give them new titles, new bosses, maybe move their offices, heck lets be really radical and put them under a different division!

OK now that all the changes are complete – go out and conquer (by the way you’re selling the same product, the same way, with essentially the same team of people and nobody spoke to a customer about their opinion of anything!) Again and again and again – doing the same thing over and over expecting different results (the best definition of insanity out there), if you’ve ever worked in a big company, this has to sound familiar.

Real change is hard. Real change is risky. Real change requires strategic thinking rather than tactical thinking. The problem is most of us are very comfortable with tactics and very uncomfortable with strategy. Tactics produce incremental change, low risk change, paint the product a darker blue kind of change. I guess the risk is what everyone is avoiding because presumably nobody gets fired for incremental change right? Wrong. Everybody gets fired when incremental change goes on too long and the market makes the final decision to fire the entire product/business. We all can name more than a few printers who have gone out of business in the last couple years.

The aspect of all this that frustrates me the most – people are working their butts off on incremental change that isn’t producing the results! The worst of all possible scenarios, people are actually getting burnt out producing very little value! I like to work hard, sometimes too hard. But working hard at something that produces little value is supremely painful to our souls and therefore takes a larger chunk out of employee morale.

Think about the last time you painstakingly created a comprehensive analysis for a decision that shouldn’t even be on the drawing board (for example) but everyone is too risk averse to speak up. I understand, we have jobs to protect, mortgages to pay, college funds to save for, etc… I’m not advocating for mutiny (although mutiny isn’t always a bad thing), but I am noticing two alarming trends:

1. Incremental change just aint good enough anymore
2. The level of risk averse behavior is on the rise

Just when we need real change, strategic thinking, and risk takers our collective behavior pattern is sinking into what I like to call “active paralyzation” – yes, lots of activity but no real change.

If you want to do something new like:

1. Expand your product set beyond print (human translated version of Marketing Service Provider)
2. Expand into another kind of print manufacturing (e.g. digital, grand format, flexo, etc…)
3. Attack a specific vertical (e.g. retail signage, financial/compliance, transactional, etc…)
4. Transition your business to be primarily online

You need to start with strategic thinking because these are NOT tactical moves. This is not incremental change; this is real change that requires answering the hard questions from the perspective of your ultimate boss – THE CUSTOMER. Don’t start with the minutia of how this will change your workflow – that’s incremental details that can be worked out later IF during your STRATEGIC thinking process you answer the tough questions like “WHY?” way before you start attacking the “HOW?”

What do I mean by strategic thinking vs. tactical thinking? I believe it’s the act of staying on the BIG and UNCOMFORTABLE questions (WHY?) rather than succumbing to the pull of diving into the weeds of tactics (HOW?). I’ve been in hundreds of conversations where we start with an executive leader stating something like “we want to expand our business into product area X, and make it XX% of our revenue by X date.” This sounds exactly like what I was taught while getting my MBA – the next step would be to create a complex and all inclusive proforma on how this will play out over the next three years (total guess). Please don’t waste your time.

I think strategic thinking has to be outcome based – so yes the first step is to consider what you’re trying to create but you can’t limit it to results from your perspective. Revenues, market share, profitability – those are metrics we monitor for existing businesses, don’t make the mistake of trying to utilize them to create new businesses. The strategic thinking has to be from the perspective of your customers which might be both direct customers and channel partners. Strategic thinking starts with honestly asking yourself why customers would buy from you! At this point, the executive spreadsheet heads in the room start rolling their eyes and thinking “when are we going to get to the real business discussion?” I love this. I love when leaders disguise their unease with discussing the reality of their business in terms of it being fluffy and not serious enough (translate, cannot be tracked in a spreadsheet).

What if your answer to the question, “why would customers buy from us?” is actually hard to answer? What if when you ask that question, the only thing that comes to mind is all the things that prevent customers from wanting to buy from you? You might have just stumbled on some strategic initiatives that would help you grow your business ;-) Or you could go back to Excel and create another proforma based on wild ass guesses on what might happen ;-)