Business Management - Marketing/Sales

China has become a country with a huge printing market and it is still growing. Its transformation into a world-class manufacturing industry with world-class printers is still evolving. As the cultural and creative areas of Chinese society start booming, the printing industry will have a new opportunity. More affluent Chinese will demand top-quality products of all kinds, and the packaging market will take the lead in creating a huge incentive for companies striving to reach these "well off" Chinese consumers.

I'll be writing about specific ways that companies in our industry can market their services to people who need them. Mostly, I'll focus on corporate end users: the buyers, designers and marketers who have a hand in choosing print along with other media to promote their businesses. Marketing to consumers is, as they say, a whole different kettle of fish.

Rookie salespeople buy lists. Savvy, veteran salespeople look around them and generate leads from the opportunities that they come across on a day-to-day basis. The result of this sales curiosity is returned phone calls, appointments and orders earned on the basis of a good idea, and not the lowest price. Oh, and they get a free cup of coffee out of it to boot. Eventually.

The first thing we need to sell in any situation is ourselves. But how do we get people to trust us if we are not given the opportunity to prove ourselves to be trustworthy? In this week's Short Attention Span Webinar, Bill and Kelly teach you how to sell trust.

There is a secret to getting your price. You can avoid price objections. In this week's Short Attention Span Webinar, Bill and Kelly will give you the keys to the kingdom and let you in on the secret.

Understanding the type of Buyer you are dealing with can be the difference between a successful sales call and one where you can hear the crickets chirp in the background. In this week's Short Attention Span Webinar, Bill and Kelly give you clues and insight into picking up the personality traits of your customer or prospect.

You just nailed a huge appointment. Congratulations! Now what? If you don't know how to make the most of this opportunity, all of your hard work will be for naught. In this week's Short Attention Span Webinar, Bill and Kelly give you ideas for nailing the sales call.

Every printed promotional piece your company produces needs analytics—whether through a QR code or just a URL. Otherwise, how the heck will you and your client know if it worked? Imagine if Isaac Newton had failed to record the results of his apple-headache experiment because it was "too much of a hassle."

In last week's Short Attention Span Webinar, Bill and Kelly gave you reasons 4-6 as to why we lose customers. Today, in part two, they give reasons one through three.

Keeping an open mind, recognizing profit potential and identifying a point of entry was all the fodder that Quad/Graphics needed to embark on its mobile technologies platform, Interactive Print Solutions (IPS). Actually, it was a direct result of QIC (Quad Idea Catapult)—the company's innovation process management framework—vetting the technologies and creating IPS as a vehicle toward delivering mobile technologies to customers. It helps that Quad/Graphics CEO Joel Quadracci not only gave the endeavor his full blessing, but acts as an evangelist for the mobile technologies.