I was on site yesterday with a digital printer in San Francisco; he has two digital presses and no sales staff. In the owner’s words, “The print sales resource model is broken.”

The model is broken because the job of “collecting print orders” is no longer relevant. Today’s printers have to understand their customer’s business in the language of the customers and find new reasons to print. Collecting print orders is a job, finding new reasons to print is a MISSION. Don’t hire a “job seeker” when you have a mission.

Print sales resources used to canvas the neighborhood touting equipment lists and paper catalogs – those days are over. This is the approach of asking the customer to learn your business in order to engage with you. We are now in a time where the tables have turned – it’s time for you to reach out and learn your customer’s business so you can recommend print solutions to them!

If this sounds like mumbo jumbo, I’ll give you some concrete tasks to make this happen:

1. Read the content of what you print today
2. Ask your customers who the target audience is for the printed pieces
3. Ask your customers what they know about that target audience (data)
4. Create a brief profile for each printed piece – think of this as the CUSTOMER job ticket (everything about the job in the customer’s terms).

For example:

Product (brochure, flyer, book, etc…)
Target Audience (current customers, prospects, association members, etc…)
Communication objective of the content (sales, educate, compliance, etc…)
Company size
Vertical market (financial, retail, manufacturing, etc…)
Print decision maker (role / title of the person who made the print buying decision)

Why the heck would you want to know all this? Well, here’s the deal – you have to find new reasons to print and the best source of data you have is on your presses today. Dive into your existing business in order to understand what your customers are trying to accomplish with print communication today so that you can accomplish (3) things:

1. Better service your existing customers (up sell)
2. Data reveals patterns which will lead you to find new customers
3. Understand the print job from the perspective of the customer (can help you understand how to potentially move this print order to a self-service eCommerce transaction in the future).

In your free time read Seth Godin’s book Linchpin and Daniel Pink’s book Drive they both write eloquently about the subjects of innovation, what motivates us, and how we have to step out of our “job” mentality and start making things happen if we want to stay relevant.