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Finishing solutions in your shop can be a necessary piece of infrastructure or a differentiator that brings you new business. How you treat finishing in your production often depends on the type of business you operate. For transaction print and mail operations, finishing may revolve around slit/merge, perf/punch, fold and insert operations, while for direct mail print shops there may be a wider range of options for folding, scoring, creasing, and tabbing. Book printers often focus on book block assembly, binding, and cover-based workflows.

Whether you have just finished training and are getting started in your sales career or you’ve been selling for decades, finding new business can be daunting. So, we’re gonna try to make this as easy on you as possible. Before you do anything else, you must know who you are going to call on. We’ll lay this out for you in, say, 12 easy steps.
 

In our previous post we established why content marketing is an effective tool for building your brand’s reputation and broadcasting it more widely to give your printing business a big boost. Content marketing is all about communicating with customers in a variety of ways that establishes you as a thought leader through a variety of channels, including blog posts, email, direct mail, social media, and more.

Printing is a competitive business. Although buyers are always seeking a good price, they are also looking for ways to add value to the messages they communicate. Transactional print buyers are working to differentiate themselves with more colors, better papers, and even unique envelopes and self-mailers. Purchasers of direct mail marketing collateral are interested in these same differentiators, but they are also exploring other options—the addition of interesting folds and cuts, embossing, lamination, and spot varnishes.

Since its introduction over a decade ago, color inkjet technology has provided the transactional print industry with numerous improvements, including better output quality, faster print speeds, greater flexibility in print jobs and increased productivity. Transactional communications are business-to-consumer (B2C) communications, such as statements, bills and customer letters, which span a variety of verticals including financial services, insurance, healthcare and utilities.