Benefits and things to consider when choosing a web-to-print solution
Most salespeople are required to negotiate with their prospects and customers. But let's face it, today's consumer and corporate buyer is much more aggressive when negotiating the terms of a sale. Unfortunately, many salespeople lack the same level of sophistication when negotiating with savvy purchasers. Here are 18 fatal mistakes that salespeople often make when they negotiate.
1. Believing that price is the primary reason people make a buying decision. Although price is a factor in every sale, it is seldom the motivating factor behind a person's final decision.
Which would you rather have: 500 mediocre leads or 25-30 high-value leads? The answer is obvious and yet many exhibitors who attend trade shows try to talk to as many people as possible, then go back to the office with a fist full of business cards and say; "see what I accomplished."
The cost of following up on all these business leads is enormous and it leaves your sales reps often disheartened with the number of rejections they receive. The solution is three-fold:
Let the photos do the talking. The full photo gallery of sights and highlights from Graph Expo 2010.
Back in the 1800s during the early days of offset lithography, limestone slabs were used as the original "printing plate." Nowadays, printed images are transferred from a thin plate (usually aluminum or polyester), onto a blanket, and then to the substrate. Plates can also be made of metal, plastic, rubber or even paper, depending on the process used. These plates are attached to a press cylinder and are used to transfer the inked image that will appear on the printed material. In general, metal plates are more expensive, but they usually last longer and have greater accuracy. As run lengths are decreasing, the latest developments in plate-making increasingly revolve around ways to make the process more environmentally-friendly by reducing or eliminating the chemicals used in the imaging process. This section will take a closer look at some of the most recent developments in printing plate technology.
The fundamental problem you are describing is a common one and is experienced by many users under a lot of circumstances. Often when we connect to services on the Internet, we connect to them by entering a name, whether it's a website, or sending e-mail or an app that posts our thoughts to Twitter. It seems to be magical somehow, but let me see if I can lift the curtain and explain the mystery.
Graph Expo just wrapped up in Chicago, and after walking around the show and speaking to customers, I've come to the conclusion that the need for print in the digital age is alive and well and innovating itself at a staggering rate. Customers were here in big numbers looking for new techniques and technologies that would continue to push the limits of what they can do with ink on paper, plastic, metal, wood, glass and many other substrates.
If you have invested in a fully automated web-to-print solution with financial database, congratulations, all the points in this article should be covered by your system. If your web-to-print solution is more of an online order and delivery system, you will need to help out your manufacturing system.
The following items need to be part of a web-to-print solution for it to succeed and profit.
How has photo booth technology changed?
In this issue, we would like to try a unique approach to summarizing Graph Expo for you. I hope the previous month's column gave you a good sense of the types of technologies to be showcased. This month, we're giving you a taste of what the show actually looked like – a bit more visual. If you missed the show, perhaps you will feel you attended!
We just returned from Graph Expo in Chicago. It was a very good show with a constant stream of visitors roaming the aisles and plenty of business transactions taking place. Agfa, Xerox, Konica Minolta, HP, Fujifilm, EFI and many others too numerous to mention, launched new products and showcased many innovations.