Manufacturers can benefit greatly from giving plant tours, says Ronald Heston, production manager at manufacturer Pomco Graphic Arts, Philadelphia. Plant tours can encourage new business, improve business relationships and help industry professionals become more knowledgeable, he says. "Help them visualize and understand the processes," he advises. "The picture is worth ten thousand words." Heston shares these 10 tips on giving plant tours:
1. Identify your objectives. Pomco often targets local prospective print buyers for tours. "The objective is to inform them of our in-house capabilities and that [we're] right in their back yard," Heston says. Most Pomco tours highlight the company's prepress, litho and thermography, engraving, foil stamping and embossing, letterpress, envelope converting, and bindery capabilities.
2. Tailor tours to specific firms. Pomco has designed tours to show International Paper sales representatives the printing processes used on the paper supplier's products. Specialized tours help improve business relationships, Heston says. "We've done that several times, and it's been very successful," he says.
3. Know participants' level of expertise. Pomco identifies tour participants by their jobs: print buyers, students, paper mill representatives or graphic designers. During conversations prior to tours, Pomco representatives also learn about projects participants have completed. Using that information, Pomco customizes its tours. For example, Heston says, "If you're talking to a graphic designer who's well versed in computers, you don't want to spend 20 minutes talking about the virtues of computer systems. However, if they've never seen the engraving process, you would spend more time on how to achieve the image, etch the plates and makeready the press."
4. Send invitations. Pomco ties plant tours in with events such as seminars on the graphic design industry. To make prospective participants feel special, the company sends them direct mail invitations.
5. Keep the groups small. Typical Pomco tours give a comprehensive overview of the company's 100,000-square-foot facility. Using small groups helps Pomco maximize the tours' efficiency and effectiveness, Heston says. "We have several salespeople who are well-versed in different [printing] processes," he says. Tour participants break up into small groups--no more than six to a group--and each group goes a different direction through the plant. That way, Heston says, a large number of people can view the entire plant in a short period of time. Small groups also are ideal because participants are more likely to ask questions, he adds.
6. Be flexible. A typical Pomco tour lasts two or three hours. Pomco encourages its tour guides to pay attention to participants' level of interest and inquisitiveness and to adjust the time span accordingly, Heston says.
7. Get everyone involved. "We like to let the employees know that there's a tour group coming through," Heston says. "Each section has developed some materials we can leave out for review. For example, foil stamping has different types of dies and foils. We set them up on a table so when we get to that area we can show them and actually have [participants] handle different types of dies."
8. Personalize the tour. Before the equipment became obsolete, Pomco used to give away linotype slugs with audience members' typeset names. Now, Heston makes tours more memorable by showing participants channel matrix scoring, a process that involves a piece of steel wool and a plastic matrix for folding paper.
9. Use discretion. When Pomco is manufacturing one client's new promotional piece, the client's competitors aren't permitted in the shop. "All tours are scheduled around what's being manufactured at the time in order to maintain the secrecy of a promotion," Heston says. "That's very important....You always have to be careful of what's on the floor and what can be viewed."
10. End tours on a high note. "After the tour, we adjourn to the conference room and set up a 'Taste of Philadelphia'--things that are locally known, [such as] soft pretzels and Tasty Kakes™--and have a question-and-answer period," Heston says. Sales representatives from other geographical areas often appreciate the hospitality, Heston says.
—Rita Tiefert
