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Planning for Success in a Tough Economy
Most of the document industry vendors I've spoken with over the last few months have related stories of longer sales cycles, cancelled or postponed orders, and a general concern over how long it will be until things return to "normal." Some are thinking about cutting prices.
But a few are looking to provide more value by finding ways to help their customers lower costs, improve quality, or add capabilities. Does this describe your company?
Personally, I believe that after the economy starts to recover we're going to be experiencing a "new normal." Resurrecting the sales strategies that worked just a couple of years ago isn't going to produce the same kind of results in the new economy.
And even veteran document professionals are recognizing that it's no longer going to be possible to fulfill their company's communications needs without some outside help. They will be looking first to those vendors that they've relied upon in the past. That's you!
We all know that mail volume has dropped dramatically. I firmly believe that some of that volume is never coming back. And the pieces that remain are likely to be highly targeted, more personalized, and of higher value than they have been in the past. Direct mail will still be a numbers game, but the outgoing numbers are going to be smaller with the response expectation numbers moving higher.
The document business is getting more complex. I was in a lively discussion with document professionals and vendors a couple of weeks ago and the consensus was that communications between businesses and customers was moving towards a highly individualized model. Some people want paper, some want email, and some want instant messages on computers or handheld devices.
Document recipients increasingly want the businesses who they allow to communicate with them to know them better. And they want to have a lot more control over what they see and how it's delivered.
This is a far cry from the types of generic messaging, spray & pray, or list segmentation that many of our print/mail production customers have embraced for a long time.
We're telling vendors that if they expect to keep selling their products and services to the in-plants and service bureaus, they'd better be doing what they can now to help their customers be prepared to deliver on the communications requirements of the future. Otherwise, those organizations won't be in a position to buy much of anything. Some may even disappear. |
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Here are three things that vendors can be doing today to help customers emerge from the recession healthy and ready to tackle the challenges of 2010 and beyond:
1. Work ahead of customer needs - They may not be asking for it now, but by the time they do, it might be too late to add functionality. Particularly if there are some major infrastructure changes necessary. Assist your customers today by providing expert help to lay the groundwork for document tracking, prepare for more robust messaging, etc.
2. Create more knowledgeable customers - The skills that made document operations folks successful in the past are no longer enough. Tomorrow's document professionals will have to be more creative and self-promoting if they intend to continue getting the work and resist future outsourcing efforts. Send in experts to show them where to look for opportunities to improve on existing jobs, lower their environmental impact, or offer more services and benefits to the internal or external customers they support.
3. Lower their costs - No, I'm not talking about reducing your prices. Instead, review the document workflows of your customers and find ways to trim their own production or postage costs. This may take some digging and some time because by now the easy cost reductions have already been addressed. We can almost always find untapped sources of savings when we analyze client document workflows. |
How many in-house document operations are considered candidates for outsourcing?
