Here’s how one production inkjet service provider found $100,000 in “easy money.”

Most print sales professionals understand how powerful a 1% price change is.  (If the “power of 1%” is new to you or you wish to socialize the idea with your team, check out this animated short.)  And most print salespeople I meet assure me that they are already doing everything they can to maximize pricing.

Maybe.

And then again, maybe not.

In our pricing programs, my team will often ask salespeople to bring the last ten deals they won.  Then we’ll ask them to sort the deals into two piles:

1. NO:  Increasing the price of this deal by 1% would have seriously jeopardized this deal.  I can’t be sure, but I think it is very unlikely that I could have asked for even 1% more and still have been able to close the deal.
2. YES:  Increasing the price of this deal by 1% probably wouldn’t have made any difference to closing this deal.  I’m reasonably confident that the customer still would have said yes, even at a slightly higher price.

It’s not at all rare to have every single deal sitting in the “Yes” pile.  Very commonly, all but one or two is in the “Yes” pile.  We ask participants to tally up the total of 1% price lift on each of their “Yes” deals. Finally, we ask sales teams to quickly calculate the total revenue increase from adding just 1% to each of the "Yes" deals across the entire team.

1% seems small, but it adds up fast.

In a recent session with a team of salespeople from a major production inkjet print service provider, the sales director did the math and found a lot of opportunity. From each salesperson’s original stack of ten won deals, she assembled the “Yes” deals and added up the incremental 1% revenue from those deals for everyone on her team. She discovered over $100,000 of additional revenue potential.

The team was astonished at “how easy” it was to find such a large chunk of money when they were sure they were already doing it.

We find this over and over with our clients:

• They understand the power of price (the “power of 1%”).
• They believe they are already maximizing every opportunity to gain every penny of price.
• But they are not actually applying this knowledge rigorously to every deal, every quote, every customer, every campaign, every print job, every day, every time. 

When we have teams dig deeper into specific opportunities, such as direct mail campaigns, personalized transactional print, or high-volume commercial print, we consistently uncover significant pricing gaps totaling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This is the costly difference between knowing and doing. Or perhaps more accurately, between "doing occasionally when we remember" and "doing systematically and consistently."

Do you and your team rigorously examine every production inkjet job to ensure you’re maximizing your pricing for the value you provide? 

Before you answer that question, take a closer look at the last ten jobs each of your salespeople won. The results might surprise you and reveal your own "easy money."