Align and Conquer
Hungry conglomerates. Tightening budgets. Online print purchasing. The traditional reseller channel has taken its fair share of hits over the years. With competition at an all-time high, how do you, the distributor, win over accounts and attract long-term business? The answer is simple. You leverage the capabilities of your supply-chain partner. Together, you can match the unique needs of each client or prospect, turning the impossible task into business as usual.
But this level of comfort isn’t achieved overnight. The right kind of conversation must take place—the kind that is predicated on trust. Print+Promo reached out to three industry suppliers—Roger Buck, director of marketing, Flesh Co, St. Louis; Melinda Christiancy, sales and customer service manager, Label Art, Wilton, N.H.; and Allen Simon, president, Datatel Resources Corporation, Monaca, Pa.—to find out how all parties can benefit from a successful alliance. Read on to learn how they support their partners and what they’ve learned along the way.
Print+Promo (P+P): What kinds of business conversations motivate you and how do you take those conversations to the next level?
Roger Buck (RB): Conversations that revolve around improvements. This could be a document design or process driven by printed documents. From there you can use questions to drill down to the core goals of the client and help fashion the best solution to reach those goals.
Melinda Christiancy (MC): We provide over 100 quotes a day to our distributor partners. It is sometimes easy to tell what opportunities are long shots and what opportunities have potential to become more. When the distributor is engaged and can answer probing questions about an intended application, we are motivated. Our goal is to train and support our customer service team to be able to help our distributors with the majority of their daily needs, but when a project requires special needs, we involve the account’s sales manager.
Allen Simon (AS): The most important conversations are when we learn what it’s going to take to secure the order and secure the business, because that means we have transitioned ourselves from one of many providing a price. When the distributor opens up a little bit on what it’s going to take to win the business, things get elevated and that’s where we can be of additional assistance to the selling skills the distributor already has. We’re not in business to process quotes; we’re in business to get orders—and to get orders you really need to work with the distributor closely and really become focused on what we (Datatel Resources and the distributor) need to do to get the business. We move it along from the exercise of providing a quote to the back-and-forth of getting the business and then all of a sudden you’re at a higher level.
P+P: In your opinion, when do the most impactful moments in business happen?
RB: There’s a point in conversations with a new prospect or client where trust is achieved. This may come from sharing (educating) information, products, solutions or other knowledge. But, you hit a point where the prospect views you as a credible source. That elevates all future conversations to a new level.
MC: We recently have been discussing throughout our organization, at all levels, what events (even the smallest ones) drive success and create positive impact for our company and our customers:
- When we get referrals
- When a dealer moves existing business to us
- When an order closes and the PO arrives
- When we get a quote for a new project
- When we deliver early
Individually these things don’t alter the course of business, but the moment a member of our team realizes how their individual success has created a positive outcome, those are impactful moments for the business.
AS: Ultimately, I think the most impactful moments happen when you get the order. That’s what you have to focus on. It doesn’t do any good to quote a good price if you really don’t have a chance to get the order. But, as you lead up to that, [impactful moments happen] when you can provide that extra service or that extra element of support that you know the end-user, through the help of the distributor, is embracing. For us, that could be something as simple as maybe a warehousing program that addresses what the distributor needs and the end-user needs that they’re not currently doing or taking advantage of. Or, maybe that could be a conversation about quality—we have a very professional customizable quality document that we can put in the hands of the end-user through the distributor that demonstrates we can do the job, and we can do the job right. To know that you’ve given the end-user something that they haven’t had before—that they find valuable—is a pretty impactful moment in our industry.
P+P: How do you support your distributor partners?
RB: Distributors may not have the ability to see all the applications, designs and markets that we see coming through the plant. We push this knowledge out through our INSIGHTS newsletter, social media, white papers, videos, blog and our website. Besides this education, we also offer onsite Lunch and Learn programs, online education and will certainly make joint sales calls.
MC: Label Art hosts Label Boot Camp twice a year. Distributors join us in a day of education and training on products and services that Label Art provides. Label Art also launched an updated website late January 2015. The new site has a marketing section where each of the unbranded marketing pieces we offer to our dealers can be downloaded and personalized. These sales tools are great for prospecting or as cross-sell tools to existing customers. In addition, our sales staff attends joint sales calls or more frequently joint teleconferences. Our customer service staff is also regularly cross-trained on the different products we offer, so sometimes calling in for a quote can turn into an educational experience for our dealers.
AS: We do whatever is needed, but, more specifically, joint sales calls. We have had distributors who’ve gone on vacation or are unavailable for a certain amount of time and we’ll tell our distributors to give me, Dick Kline [our vice president of distributor sales], or any number of people over here at Datatel a call if they need something, and we’ll step in. When we’re needed at a customer’s location, if we’re generally given 24 hours notice, we’ll find a way of being there.
P+P: In order to get the job done—and done well—what do you need from your distributor partners?
RB: Accurate information. This may sound like an SOP, however, we often only get enough information to produce a product, not provide options for better solutions. The more information we can receive on how a document is used, what’s not working, what are the customer’s goals and what is on their “wish list,” the better we can provide the best solutions to benefit the client and potentially elevate our distributors position within the account.
MC: Communication is key for us to deliver a job that not only meets a customer’s needs, but exceeds them. Most transactions are very smooth—as technology becomes more accessible, our partners have become even more knowledgeable and comfortable asking for what they want. But when a problem arises, be it budget or time constraints, our partners should feel comfortable calling us with their situation and letting us offer solutions. We’re not just offering labels, we’re offering years of expertise to find an answer that will keep their customer on time, on budget, and most of all, happy.
AS: We need our distributors to do what they do best and that’s to sell and create relationships. Contrary to what you hear sometimes, we’re not the selling experts. If we’re brought along, and we should be brought along in certain opportunities, we can certainly help. We’re very good in front of customers, but we are a low-cost, wholesale manufacturer—sales is not what we do best. So, what we need our distributors to do is to get out there and sell (even if it’s an existing customer), to support the relationship on a consistent basis, to call on us and include us when it’s strategically best to do so, and to make sure that that relationship is maintained. We can support and we should support. We can answer technical questions. We can offer suggestions on ways to improve their efficiency. Probably the most important thing we can do is we can give the end-user the comfort level that there is a very reliable team backing up the proposal. I know the end-user likes to see the integration of the distributor and manufacturer and how the two of them are going to support their business. End-users are more and more open to how that relationship between a distributor and a manufacturer works, so if you can get in front of the customer and demonstrate that, there are many customers who are open to that. We call it the triangle between the distributor, manufacturer and end-user. If we can connect them, then we’ve done a good job. It’s about being in front of a customer and having them feel very comfortable with the people who are in front of them that they can get the job done. That can be a very strategic discussion about efficiencies and processes, or that can be a dinner and a night at the ball game where you just get to know each other.
P+P: What lessons have you learned from your various partnerships along the way? Is there anything you would’ve done differently?
RB: Communication is the key. We need to consistently visit with our partners, whether distributors or suppliers, to stay current with the changes and opportunities that may exist. This can be very challenging, yet this sharing can provide information that could lead to a new product or new market, which we could then share with our reseller base.
MC: Be good to everyone, you never know who is going to hit it big and when they may need your help. Someone doing $300 a year this year could be your $300,000 customer next year.
AS: Could we (by “we” I mean not only us, but our distributors) have been a little more aggressive in our approach with the customer? For business we didn’t get, maybe we needed to be a little more proactive about something as simple as a test run—something that could be part of our proposal. You can quote a price to run a certain type of job. Being more aggressive is making sure our distributors are armed with what they need to go in an offer all the options that we know might be necessary to win the business.
P+P: Is there a particular job or project that you worked on with a distributor that stands out to you?
RB: One of our larger clients recently asked for help in training some of the newer hires on the basics of print. They were not looking for a Flesh Co sales pitch, but rather a broader overview of printing and offline processes. Flesh Co created a presentation that covered offset, flexo, digital and other technologies. We also reached out to other manufacturers to supply us with samples of their printing processes and gave them credit during the presentation so the attendees would have a better understanding of the various print solutions possible.
MC: Recently, we had an existing customer who also has dealt with a competitor of ours for many years on a project for their largest customer. For months, this dealer shared how they wanted to move the business, but with each order that came and went they didn’t. When we asked why, it all came down to the ordering process having become a habit. The order came in, the order was placed, the order came in, the order was placed—something always seemed to happen that left the dealer less than pleased with their current situation, but it was always something they felt they would deal with the next time the order came in, but then didn’t. A few weeks ago, this dealer had lunch with their customer who shared that things needed to go smooth on their next order or they may need to put the work out to bid. To complicate matters they needed this next order rush delivered and special packaged. The dealer made the switch because they said trusted us. We were able to produce and special-finish 1,500-plus rolls of product for this customer in less than a week. The dealer and end-user were thrilled and we now have this business. The only regret anyone had was that the move hadn’t been done sooner.
AS: We had an opportunity with one of our better clients about four months ago. A call came in to my cellphone at 5:15 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. They needed a trailer-load of product delivered by 10 a.m. on Monday. We started the job on our second shift Friday night and we were able to schedule and coordinate an entire shift to come in Saturday to ship out the product on Sunday and have it delivered on Monday. It was a jumbo roll order—something that a customer needed for a very, very important mailing that they had no idea they needed until 5:15 p.m. that Friday. It took a lot of effort because it’s more than just scheduling the manufacturing part—we needed to get the file through our system, we needed to generate plates, we needed to do the prepress, we needed to coordinate the trucking line, which is no small feat these days at that hour on a Friday to come in on a Sunday and deliver on a Monday. It took dedicated employees like what we have to come in on a Saturday, disrupt their weekends for a very important customer and it took a distributor to be able to coordinate all of this well with a customer and well with us to qualify it to make sure it required the action we were going to take on it.
Elise Hacking Carr is senior production editor for Print & Promo Marketing magazine, and managing editor for PRINTING United Journal.