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Do your customers understand the contribution your inkjet production investment can make to their success? Promoting and demonstrating the value inkjet digital printing brings to clients is a critical sales tool. According to Keypoint Intelligence‒InfoTrends’ research on sales best practices, 40% of print service providers are NOT supporting sales efforts with lead generation campaigns today! Firms cannot solely reply on inbound marketing to grow their companies. Promotional campaigns, marketing materials, and educational efforts that demonstrate digital printing capabilities drive new opportunities for sales reps. These tools highlighting the benefits of digital printing can focus the sales conversation on new opportunities versus price. Many of you have told us that creating winning self-promotion pieces is time-consuming and takes away from daily operations. For this reason, we’ve been working diligently to provide you with a portfolio of promotional materials that will elevate …

It’s already been a busy year for the entire thINK Board! We’re focused on bringing thINK members as many valuable resources and learning opportunities as possible, and we’re planning an entire event full of relevant, action-oriented workshops at thINK 2018. Plus, in the lead up to thINK, we’ve got even more up our sleeves, including the first of our brand new thINK Virtual Workshops.  This series of free, personalized marketing workshops is designed to help thINK members market their services more strategically. Each workshop will be led by marketing industry experts who will share tested best practices and who will consult with workshop participants on how to solve the challenges they actually face.  Unlike a webinar, the size of each workshop will be limited in order to provide a hands-on, practical experience for the whole group. Expect to share examples from your own experience, discuss solutions with your instructors and peers, and come away with marketing strategies you can put …

Hope to see you at thINK 2018! This will be my third thINK conference, but the 2017 conference was an important one for us at Indiana Farm Bureau Insurance. We knew we would be taking delivery of an Océ VarioPrint i-series, as well as a Canon imagePRESS C10000VP in the coming months. The conference gave us a chance to talk to people who had already installed inkjet so we would know what to expect. I’ve got to say that the Klik Bracelets really helped with that process. I’ve been to a lot of conferences and that was – hands-down – the best way to get people to interact with each other. The Move to Inkjet When we started looking at inkjet, we were running six toner devices 24/7. As an insurance company, most of what we print is invoices, declarations, policy changes, and id cards. But we also print marketing postcards for our agents on a daily basis, as well as some higher-quality marketing print. Two years ago we brought agent business cards inhouse rather than continue outsourcing. We …

Sales training is important. Recent research by CSO Insights* revealed that good sales training programs helped companies meet sales quotas, achieve higher win rates, align solutions to customer needs, and experience lower sales force turnover. In addition, Hubspot found that high-performing sales organizations are twice as likely to provide ongoing training as low-performing ones. Before launching a training initiative, though, companies must ensure that their strategy is sound and will provide the needed direction to their sales organization. With color inkjet being the fastest-growing sector within the printing industry, successful companies will take the initiative to accelerate innovation, growth, and customer value. As part of the customer growth initiatives that Canon in collaboration with thINK ( see thINK Forward Vol. 3, Issue 1 for more details! ), Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends’ customer strategy services can help businesses focus on production inkjet and gain traction …

When the thINK user group asked me to share my story, I raised my hand right away. In fact, I presented at a session on in-plants last year at the thINK conference. You can watch it here . I’m in charge of fulfillment at Intersections. We work with financial institutions to provide credit monitoring and data breach solutions. Being an in-plant, our customers are our internal marketing team and the companies we partner with to provide identity theft solutions. Back in 2009, we bought two Océ JetStream 100s. Those were the early years of inkjet. There wasn’t a thINK community we could tap for help, and there were definitely challenges in those days. We struggled with finding paper developed for inkjet. I believe there were only two at that time, and they were hard to get. Color matching was challenging too, especially with limited paper options. Ink costs were high then too.  Committed to Inkjet Despite all those issues, we remained committed to inkjet. It was the only solution that …