Every operation has them. Those difficult clients with messy jobs, bad files and unrealistic expectations. The customers that your team tries to avoid. Their jobs result in chaos. And the refrain is: “Why can’t they be like department X (insert name of your best customer)?”

Do all your customers know everything your operation can do? I rarely get a ‘Yes’ when I ask this question. In-plant operations typically serve many customers and internal departments producing a wide range of products and services. Yet many of those same customers may have little comprehension of the full breath of services your operation can produce.

Successful commercial printers and print/mail service providers take the time to conduct regular planning meetings with their largest clients. These meetings may be called quarterly business reviews, account reviews, executive business reviews, or planning meetings. At these meetings, senior level people from the client and the vendor attend. There is a structured agenda with a focus on the services, value, and metrics for print/mail services.

I hope you attended some great online webinars in the last year. Events where the content was salient, the speakers were engaging, the technology worked well and there was relevant interaction with the attendees. At the end, you felt it was worth your time to attend.

I suspect you have also attended some ineffective online events that were not well delivered, and you tuned out, or were bored and began multi-tasking during the event. Or worse, left

Do your customers know everything you can do for them? This is a question I ask at the beginning of consulting engagements. The answer is usually some variation of, “No, most customers don’t really understand everything we can do.”

This is a big challenge for in-plants. Educating customers and senior leaders in your organizations about everything you do - and can do - to support the strategic goals of your organizations is a critical role for in-plant managers. If senior leaders don’t understand what you do and how it benefits the larger goals of your organization, it’s a slippery slope to outsourcing.

Does every manager and team leader understand the marketing strategy for your company? Some owners of companies challenge me when I ask this question. “Why does our IT manager need to know our marketing strategy”, they ask. A concise marketing strategy is the basis that drives activities, decisions and investments in sales, client service, operations and finance as well as marketing.

Common phrases heard from marketing professionals: “We do all our marketing by email, so we don’t need to direct mail,” and “We have a website, so I don’t need to print, and we use social media, so we don’t need to do direct mail.”

Too many print companies still rely on traditional methods for interacting with their clients. Instead of suggesting creative ways they can help their clients achieve business goals, print companies keep focusing sales conversations on quotes and printed products they can provide.