You may have already switched your personal page on Facebook to the new timeline layout (what is it?). Now, if you have a Page for your company on Facebook, you can do the same. According to AllFacebook.com:

Facebook’s new design for pages combines the much anticipated timeline with pinning.

There are three ways to see a preview of it that also presents you with the option to upgrade to timeline right now:

… Read more »

Salespeople know their product or service like the back of their hand, and can make the sell usually discounting the price, thinking they can make up for the loss. It’s even more important when making a sale to realize the value your product has for your customer. What makes a salesperson a sales guru, is selling the product to the customer is closing the sale by understanding and getting to your customer’s needs and wants, without comprising the price.

Read Mark Hunter’s full article below from his article, Why Higher Profits Keep Alluding You, on why it’s important to truly uncover the true wants and needs of the customer.

Do you really understand what your customer wants and/or needs?

Seems like an obvious question, doesn’t it?

What I’ve discovered, though, is that whether a salesperson can command high profits usually boils down to this matter of what the customer really wants.

Unfortunately, salespeople tend to know their product or service so well that they gravitate toward singing the praises of the features of what they sell — instead of patiently and intentionally uncovering the true wants and needs of the customer.

So what does this have to do with profits?

Well, the salesperson who doesn’t discover what the customer wants will always be quick to discount price in order to get the sale. … Read more »

One of the challenges in making the transition from a print service provider to a marketing services provider lies in understanding how to charge for—and sell—new services. This is not an issue that is exclusive to the printing industry by any means. Anytime a company makes a business shift such as this, there is also a cultural shift that must happen.

Conventional printing sales are generally priced using a cost-plus model.  That is, all of the costs are added up, a margin is added, and voila! You have a price. The cost elements are fairly straightforward, and the margin is determined by taking a number of factors into consideration, including how competitive the bid is.

While this model can certainly be applied to cross-media services, companies who do so are likely leaving money on the table.  Why?  Because deployed right, cross-media services bring more value to the customer than a simple printed piece.  What’s more important is that the value is measurable. Can you double or triple the response rates the customer has been receiving by deploying a personalized, multichannel campaign? There is certainly value in that.  Can you improve the customer’s return on marketing investment (ROMI)? There is significant value in that as well. These and other metrics can generally be improved when cross-media campaigns are deployed…. Read more »

One of the key challenges many print and marketing service providers face is that they often find themselves in a price war. The problem mostly rises when they want to beat the competition solely by trying to offer the cheapest product or service.

This happens when you treat your product (or service) with a “price-per-piece” mentality and start selling it as a commodity.

In this scenario no one wins — not even the customer. The competitors constantly try to cut their already narrow margins until one walks away. The company which walks away has lost the business. The company which gets the business is now left with an account that barely breaks even. It only takes a minor revision in the work- which happens to be the fact of life in this industry- to make the thin margin disappear. And the customer, more often than not, won’t get the quality service she expects, because the service provider tries to keep the costs low…. Read more »