Your kit and consumables suppliers have a vested interest in helping you succeed. So do you use them to best effect in helping grow your business? Tim Greene of InfoTrends thinks you should demand more.
It may sound simplistic, but we [at InfoTrends] believe that there is a great case to be made that wide-format printing companies of all size could be taking a more aggressive approach to business growth and development by leveraging the resources of their suppliers.
One of the findings from the InfoTrends/Fespa World Wide survey that surprises me is the fact that more than 40% of the respondents have never participated in a vendor-sponsored training or educational programme. We believe this is a shame, because there are a number of programmes, sponsored and/or developed by vendors and distributors that can enhance a company’s business.
Donald Trump famously said “if you borrow $3,000 from the bank and you can’t pay it back you have a problem. If you borrow $30 million from a bank and can’t pay it back, now WE have a problem”. What he means is that when you go big, and make an investment in high-end equipment, the bank, or in this case, the vendor, has a particular interest in seeing you succeed.
There are two especially notable business building programmes from high-end suppliers. There’s the EFI programme, called Connect, which is not only an event, but also a set of sales and marketing tools and templates that the vendor has developed to help their customers market their services. The, there’s the HP Capture programme (for full-disclosure purposes: InfoTrends helps compose some of the HP Capture content), which includes a wide variety of tools, training, and templates that are designed to help a company market and more effectively sell its services.
The idea of leveraging the resources of vendors should definitely not be limited to high-end customers. In fact what we found was that the smaller a company was in terms of revenue, the less likely they were to have participated in a vendor-sponsored training or educational programme. This is probably because small shops don’t have the time and resources to send someone away for a few days to get trained or just spend a few days thinking about how to better market their company. Manufacturers that serve the lower end of the market such as Mutoh, Mimaki, and Roland have also developed education and training initiatives, some of which are available in dispersed geographic locations or even via on-line channels such as YouTube.
Another source for this kind of marketing and business-building assistance is your supplies manufacturers and distributors. We know that companies like 3M, Avery, and InteliCoat have developed ways to help customers learn how to use the products and even help sponsor customer who want to become certified installers. So ask your equipment and supplies dealers if they can facilitate your participation in these types of learning events.
The onus is on you to grow your business, and one way to help make that happen is to rely on your supplier partners for tools and techniques that can lead to new business. If your vendor partners don’t offer this kind of help, ask them to. If they do, take advantage of it.
Finally, I would say this, none of these aforementioned tools are designed to be static programmes, so if you find them lacking in some way, if they are missing something or if you think they could be delivered in a way where they could be better utilised, make sure your vendor partners know that too.
The companies that sell you wide-format digital printing equipment and supplies need you to be successful, so help them help you by using what they have and asking for what they don’t. Don’t just think about how the equipment can help you get where you want to be in terms of production, think about how your vendor partners can help you on the sales and marketing side as well.