This post was contributed by Leslie Groene, Groene Consulting, and instructor of several new online Sales Courses available in Printing Industries of America’s Integrated Learning Center. It’s no secret that the role of a salesperson has changed. The Internet provides your customers with an infinite number of options making it impossible to compete on price alone. Customers are 57% through their buying process before they seek engagement with suppliers. Your customers expect more; to seal the deal, they want top-notch customer service and value-added benefits.  Shift 1: Salesperson to Consultant You want your sales team to grow your existing customer base, acquire new ones, and/or win back those customers you may have lost. To do this, salespeople must build relationships and become a solutions provider, asking, “How can I become a part of their team as a consultant? How can I give them more leverage and success with their clients?” The sad truth is, there’s a lot of poor customer service out there. What did you do the last time you had a negative experience with a company? Many salespeople just aren’t aware of how their attitudes affect customers. Here’s a look at how customers respond to poor service from sales consultant, Leslie Groene: 96% of unhappy customers do not complain, they just stop doing business with you. 91% of those who don’t complain will share the negative story with at least 9 other people, 13% will tell more than 20 other people about their experience. The average unhappy customer will remember the incident for 23 years. The happy customer will talk about the pleasant experience for 18 months. For every complaint heard, the average company has 25 other customers with the same problem. Like a consultant, salespeople need to focus on improving their client’s business performance, which means they need to have the understanding and have experience to help their clients solve problems. They’re not selling a product or service; instead they’re selling value. Shift 2: Price-driven to Value Driven If you’ve ever lost a sale because a customer said, “Your prices are too high,” it’s time to shift your strategy to adding value and not focusing on a low bid. Start by building a relationship with your customer. This is not like flipping a switch. Like any relationship, it needs to be cultivated and nourished. Here are the four steps to developing a healthy, profitable relationship with your clients: Develop trust (40%)—Be consistent and follow through Identify their true needs and wants (30%)—How can you help their business grow Present a solution (20%)—Strategically engage their needs and wants Confirmation (10%)—Close the sale, gauge relationship, and proceed to next step After you’ve developed this relationship, you’re more prepared to...

This post was contributed by Leslie Groene, Groene Consulting, and instructor of several new online Sales Courses available in Printing Industries of America’s Integrated Learning Center. It’s no secret that the role of a salesperson has changed. The Internet provides your customers with an infinite number of options making it impossible to compete on price alone. Customers are 57% through their buying process before they seek engagement with suppliers. Your customers expect more; to seal the deal, they want top-notch customer service and value-added benefits.  Shift 1: Salesperson to Consultant You want your sales team to grow your existing customer base, acquire new ones, and/or win back those customers you may have lost. To do this, salespeople must build relationships and become a solutions provider, asking, “How can I become a part of their team as a consultant? How can I give them more leverage and success with their clients?” The sad truth is, there’s a lot of poor customer service out there. What did you do the last time you had a negative experience with a company? Many salespeople just aren’t aware of how their attitudes affect customers. Here’s a look at how customers respond to poor service from sales consultant, Leslie Groene: 96% of unhappy customers do not complain, they just stop doing business with you. 91% of those who don’t complain will share the negative story with at least 9 other people, 13% will tell more than 20 other people about their experience. The average unhappy customer will remember the incident for 23 years. The happy customer will talk about the pleasant experience for 18 months. For every complaint heard, the average company has 25 other customers with the same problem. Like a consultant, salespeople need to focus on improving their client’s business performance, which means they need to have the understanding and have experience to help their clients solve problems. They’re not selling a product or service; instead they’re selling value. Shift 2: Price-driven to Value Driven If you’ve ever lost a sale because a customer said, “Your prices are too high,” it’s time to shift your strategy to adding value and not focusing on a low bid. Start by building a relationship with your customer. This is not like flipping a switch. Like any relationship, it needs to be cultivated and nourished. Here are the four steps to developing a healthy, profitable relationship with your clients: Develop trust (40%)—Be consistent and follow through Identify their true needs and wants (30%)—How can you help their business grow Present a solution (20%)—Strategically engage their needs and wants Confirmation (10%)—Close the sale, gauge relationship, and proceed to next step After you’ve developed this relationship, you’re more prepared to...

Profit leaders—printers in the top 25% of profitability—saw profits increase to 10.3% in 2013 and the forecast looks like increasing profits into 2016, based on the 2014-15 Ratios results. Now is the time to make a decision—do you invest those extra profits into growth areas, or do you save for a rainy day? Here Ed Gleeson, Director, Center for Economics and Market Research and Stu Margolis, Partner, Margolis Partners, give a plain-English explanation of the Key Printing Industry Ratios you need to be aware of—to keep your business strong both in good times and in bad. Increasing profits enable companies to grow by generating capital that can be invested into additional productive capacity, hiring additional workers, and moving into new facilities.  Profits can also be retained as a buffer for difficult times, and/or reward shareholders with dividends. Profits play an important role in the success in the economy and our industry. John E. Silvia, Chief Economist, Wells Fargo Securities states this regarding profits, “When viewed from the context of the business cycle, profits are a residual, or a buffer to fluctuations in the economy. Relative to real factors such as economic growth or employment, as well as inflation, wages or interest rates, profits are far more variable. As a buffer, profits fluctuate significantly over the cycle. Over time, however, profit growth tends to remain stable, indicating that the pace of profit growth is consistent with the pace of economic growth and the offsetting effects of changes in input costs and sales revenues.” At the current phase in the business cycle, printing industry profits are increasing along with capacity utilization. Profits declined slightly in 2013 compared to 2012, but according to recent readings from various sources printing industry profits are trending upwards in 2014. This increase in profitability along with signs of increasing shipments and capacity utilization make it a good time to review our top Seven Key Printing Industry Ratios. Preparing for the future First, though, let’s take a closer look at why these ratios are important. In good times (relative to the past few years) it’s important to ensure everything is in line to prepare for the eventual cyclical downturn (recession). We currently forecast economic growth to continue into 2015 and 2016, but forecasts past a two-year horizon contain many assumptions and increased variability. In other words there are too many unknowns for us to accurately forecast out past the two year mark. To view the cyclical nature of profits we plot Printing Industry Profitability vs. changes in Real Gross Domestic Product in Figure 1. When comparing printing industry profitability to changes in Real GDP we use profits as a percent of value added instead of profits as a...

Profit leaders—printers in the top 25% of profitability—saw profits increase to 10.3% in 2013 and the forecast looks like increasing profits into 2016, based on the 2014-15 Ratios results. Now is the time to make a decision—do you invest those extra profits into growth areas, or do you save for a rainy day? Here Ed Gleeson, Director, Center for Economics and Market Research and Stu Margolis, Partner, Margolis Partners, give a plain-English explanation of the Key Printing Industry Ratios you need to be aware of—to keep your business strong both in good times and in bad. Increasing profits enable companies to grow by generating capital that can be invested into additional productive capacity, hiring additional workers, and moving into new facilities.  Profits can also be retained as a buffer for difficult times, and/or reward shareholders with dividends. Profits play an important role in the success in the economy and our industry. John E. Silvia, Chief Economist, Wells Fargo Securities states this regarding profits, “When viewed from the context of the business cycle, profits are a residual, or a buffer to fluctuations in the economy. Relative to real factors such as economic growth or employment, as well as inflation, wages or interest rates, profits are far more variable. As a buffer, profits fluctuate significantly over the cycle. Over time, however, profit growth tends to remain stable, indicating that the pace of profit growth is consistent with the pace of economic growth and the offsetting effects of changes in input costs and sales revenues.” At the current phase in the business cycle, printing industry profits are increasing along with capacity utilization. Profits declined slightly in 2013 compared to 2012, but according to recent readings from various sources printing industry profits are trending upwards in 2014. This increase in profitability along with signs of increasing shipments and capacity utilization make it a good time to review our top Seven Key Printing Industry Ratios. Preparing for the future First, though, let’s take a closer look at why these ratios are important. In good times (relative to the past few years) it’s important to ensure everything is in line to prepare for the eventual cyclical downturn (recession). We currently forecast economic growth to continue into 2015 and 2016, but forecasts past a two-year horizon contain many assumptions and increased variability. In other words there are too many unknowns for us to accurately forecast out past the two year mark. To view the cyclical nature of profits we plot Printing Industry Profitability vs. changes in Real Gross Domestic Product in Figure 1. When comparing printing industry profitability to changes in Real GDP we use profits as a percent of value added instead of profits as a...

This post was contributed by Stuart W. Margolis, CPA, MT and Suzette Margolis from Margolis Partners, LLC. Together with Printing Industries of America and membership participation, Margolis Partners brings you the annual Ratios Survey. Visit www.printing.org/ratios to learn more or participate in the 2015 Ratios Survey.  For most of us, ratios are not something we think of every day, at least not until springtime and the onset of baseball season. If you want to compare two Major League home-run hitters, you are likely to compare their batting averages.  If one is hitting .389 and the other’s average is .236, you immediately know which is doing better, even if you don’t know precisely how a batting average is calculated.   When applied to business, think of ratios as “batting averages for business”. In baseball or in business most ratios measure some form of productivity. They generally give an indication of how one result varied in relation to another. Ratios are a tool to make it easier to do an “apples to apples” comparison.  In fact, the classic batting average statistic is: The number of hits made by the batter, divided by the number of times the player was at bat. (For baseball enthusiasts, those are “official at-bats,” which is total appearances at the plate minus walks, sacrifice plays, and any time the player was hit by a pitch.)  The batting average is thought of as a measure of a baseball player’s productivity; it is the ratio of hits made to the total opportunities to make a hit.  HITSAT BATS Other baseball ratios include Earned Run Averages, Average Pitching Strikes to Ball Ratio, and more.  For some reason, they all make sense to us. Avid fans can visually see each pitch, strike out, and hit so they have a general idea of how players and team are performing.  In business, it is more difficult to “see” productivity, especially productivity as compared to the competition. After all, we don’t line up and engage a competitor in an open field for the whole world to see. It makes monitoring ratios all the more critical. There are many ratios you can use to monitor productivity verses the competition.  They all measure how good a job your company is doing using its assets, generating profits from each dollar of sales, turning over inventory, or whatever aspect of your company’s operation you are evaluating. For your business, ratios are nothing more than simple comparisons between specific pieces of information pulled from your company’s balance sheet and income statement. You can use ratio analysis to examine the current performance of your company in comparison to past periods of time, from the prior quarter to years ago. Frequently, this can...