6 lessons about selling print learned from a visit to the pub
Do your customers drive you to drink?!
I’m very lucky: I love all my customers and they rarely give me problems. Having said that, I am partial to a beer or two. So I can occasionally be seen visiting a good old British pub.
A few weeks ago, I visited a local pub with a friend of mine to have a catch up and enjoy a few drinks. We were intrigued by a sign that we saw near our table. We then had a discussion about whether this notice was necessary or not. Our conversation about the sign led me to draw some parallels with the print industry. You can find out more about these in the fifth part of this series.
Before long, I was finding parallels all over the place between the pub business and the printing industry. A lot of what the pub was doing provides some valuable lessons for the printing industry. Some of those lessons are positive, some less so. However, one thing’s for sure.
There’s a lot more in common between the printing industry and the pub industry than you might think
Find out what printing companies can learn from the pub industry
Over the course of a couple of beers, we found a lot of interesting business strategies in the pub. All of these strategies are worthy of discussion in the printing industry as well.
As a result, I have come up with this series of six issues that I think are particularly worthy of note. They form the basis of this series of articles. Here is what I am going to be writing about:
- Don’t give your customers too much choice
- It’s easy to be too clever when you sell
- Do you have the right profit margin?
- Do you do enough to entice your customers?
- State the obvious when you sell
- Why choosing premium customers makes sense
Each article will draw a parallel between one particular experience in the pub and what this could mean if you wish to run a successful print business.
This is more than just a series of articles
Each post will also have a simple action point that you can apply to your business. In my experience, there are few printing companies that are actually putting what I suggest into practice. Yet, from my long experience of buying print, printing companies should give these action points serious consideration.
All the action points are easy to put into practice. Combined, they could make a big difference to your business.
“There’s a lot more in common between the printing industry and the pub industry than you might think” https://t.co/3Hvf68v4pS
— Matthew Parker (@PrintChampion) January 16, 2017
Look out for the first article in this series next week
Make sure you read “Don’t give your customers too much choice“ as soon as it is published next week. I am hoping that this series will create some useful debate for the printing industry. I am also hoping that the strategies suggested in the article will become more widespread.
Most of all, I am hoping that you will win more of the right type of customers. These are the ones that don’t drive you to drink. But they may cause you to crack open a drink or two in celebration when you win more business from them!
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