Print Solutions Magazine

More than 15 years ago, our firm facilitated 30 all-day programs for the organization now known as DMIA. Attendance was open to forms distributors and forms manufacturers, and both were represented in equal numbers.

It would’ve been obvious to an inter-planetary visitor that distributors and manufacturers weren't engaged in a love fest. Attendees took seats at opposing ends of the horseshoe-shaped table, with the association representatives and facilitator at the head. It's an understatement to say that the printing industry had an internal focus at that time.

Like it or not, in today’s business environment the customer usually has the upper hand. It’s not a nefarious plot. Due to history, tradition and economics, our industry is spliced, diced and minced into fragments, segments and product categories that are almost always smaller than the buyers we pursue. The bottom line: price competition is intense.

In recent years, many print buyers have accepted the notion of a single-source supplier. Forms management has been important in the development of this trend. But this type of relationship is too often treated as a triumph by the supplier without sufficient appreciation of the buyer's apprehension. Many consultants, including this one, have written of the need for an agreement that can be abrogated by failure to meet certain performance standards. A buyer's decision to put all of his eggs in one basket makes economic sense, but it also raises a series of “what if” anxieties.

What does this have to do with traditional tensions between forms distributors and manufacturers? Most buying organizations simply want a giant dose of general anesthesia. They want to deliver electronic files and a purchase order and to be awakened when the final, specified product is delivered. That process requires a relationship between distributors and manufacturers that hardly existed 15 years ago. In l992, we had evidence of only a few joint sales calls on print buyers, a step considered almost revolutionary at the time.

You’d be hard-pressed to find print buyers who spend more than 30 percent of their time buying and coordinating the production and distribution of printed material. That's not a guess. Thousands of surveys conducted by our firm reveal that this is a prevalent condition. In this environment, manufacturers and distributors need to understand that their cooperation must appear seamless to the client.

Put yourself in the position of a buyer whose organization has entrusted you with printed material, mailing lists and customer information. Imagine you call to check the status of a job in process, and the temp answering the phone doesn't recognize your name or your organization. Maybe your cartons aren’t labeled correctly or consistently. Invoices, prepared correctly and in accordance with special instructions for many months, suddenly “go off the rails.”

These blips may be tolerated by the occasional customer. But the customer committed to a print management program becomes nervous, imagining staff problems, lack of appreciation for its business, economic difficulties—you name it. The risk is magnified if you haven’t had a recent formal review of the relationship. It’s bad news if the customer has a sense—justified or not—that its business has been taken for granted.

The typical teenager’s response to criticism is, “Nobody’s perfect.” Unfortunately, that’s a lame response to issues caused by buyers’ expectations in an environment perceived as commoditized. Even a minor flaw, such as an uninformed employee answering the phone, might convey the sense that, “My supplier doesn’t care as much as he used to.” The consequences could be catastrophic.

Contributing Editor Dick Gorelick is an award-winning authority on sales, marketing and business strategies for the printing industry. As president of the Graphic Arts Sales Foundation in West Chester, Pa., he travels extensively, consulting, writing and speaking on sales training.