Print Upsell: How to Convince Customers to Place Large Orders with You

Are there any tricks involved to convince your print customers to place large orders with you?

Printing businesses are challenging and rapid change in customer preferences and buyers’ journey is making sales more complicated. Print sales representatives fail to understand what the key considerations of customers’ are, while they are looking for getting big orders from existing or new customers. We have been into the business of providing printing technology to printers for more than a decade. This not only gives us understanding about the printing businesses but also about how their customers want businesses to be. If you are reading this right now and wondering if actually there are tricks to get more and large customers, you are right. Yes, there are few tricks involved along with technology to convince your customers to place large order with us.

Are you reaching them at the right time?

Let’s assume businesses with whom your printing press might be working for years got a sudden change in management or marketing or vendor relationship team and they are again in hunt for a right print service provider. And as everyone says they are googling aka, searching over the internet for local print service providers and as a result, they got good number of searches from local directories, website of the companies and Google Adwords as well. But unfortunately, they didn’t find you, because your website or printing business is not on the internet. The idea of hard selling is over and businesses have to be available to serve customers when they are looking for services not by cold calling or emailing.

Printing businesses need to put extra efforts for marketing and selling their services online via web to print solutions. The whole exercise needs to be phased around type of customers you are dealing with, revenue targets you are trying to achieve in and investments to be done in marketing.

When is the last time you updated your own brochures?

Printing businesses fail to print themselves with nice brochures, marketing flyers and updated price lists. Companies buying print have to go to printers to ask whether they can do the printing jobs with the right material and technique as their old collaterals doesn’t tell about their new capabilities. The trick here is to update your brochures, marketing messages and pricing list at a defined interval of time and also send them to your customers. Also, it is advisable to create two separate pricing lists for your new and existing customers based on the customer order value or bulk pricing. This shortens the buying cycle for customers to reach out to your sales representative and work out the pricing.

How sound is your customer communications?

Printers communicate with customers when there’s a change in artwork or change in image or job being done or getting approvals. Apart from just calling them to ask for next year’s print requirements or asking for approvals, customers do love to hear from you. It is not necessarily be an offer or discount, it can be new software you have incorporated in your print MIS or new office you have set up or new printing techniques you have incorporated. Customer communications need to be working all the time apart from work also.

Print sales representatives have to nurture all the relationships they build in the industry. According to a research by Printing Impressions, most of the print buyers place their bulk or large orders with the printing companies based on the relationship and communications they have with print sales representatives. Establishing a proper sales communication channel in the beginning of the sales cycle as well as after order completion is imperative for large print orders.

Have you adopted technology yet?

Technology creates unmatched advantage if done right. All these emerging print ecommerce solutions or business models, direct mailing services, Variable data printing services are done by right technological initiatives. With the availability of affordable open source models and right technological partner it is one of the trick that will help you in getting new and repetitive customers. Advanced web to print solutions with integrated live quotes and pricing, dynamic and mobile responsive websites, in-built design studio, approval workflow management, easily integrated print MIS and many more features free print service providers from manual record keeping of print jobs, coordinating customers over phone and mail, mailing them work samples etc.

This gives immense time to print owners to promote their services rather than being involved in non-core activities. Web to print technology work in coordination with human manpower to bring out the best services for your clients and thus helps in getting more customers and large value orders.

Using technology in right way is itself a trick to get larger orders from existing and new clients. Anyone who is involved in print buying understands the pain of placing orders, identifying right material, color, paper etc, so technologies like web to print having all advanced features ease out the pain making them loyal customers placing large orders with you.

Have you enabled quantity based pricing printing for better margins or larger orders?

There are various reasons for emerging of short-run printing services. Customers keep on changing their messages as per target audience or shrinking print budgets or hyper-personalized messages or voicing opinions on any international or national event. Web to print or print on demand services fairly brings option of printing smaller size orders.

On the other hand web to print integrated with live quote or pricing also helps customers is assessing of printing their entire business cards or marketing leaflets or letterheads in one-go with print providers. It is a good idea to give them additional discounts or offers if they are placing large sized orders for you. The trick involved is to lure your customers by giving them a quick overview of how much are they savings per year on printing, so instead of saying “Get an additional discount of XYZ%”, change it to “You are saving XYZ% on your annual print spending.”

These are the few tricks that can help you in getting large orders that might help you in getting more customers. Times are changing and establishing right technological as well as human connect is essential to be in the business for longer run.

Happy Printing!