Screen Printing - February/March 2013 - (Page 12)

t h e p r e p r e s s w ire INCREASING YOUR PROFIT Mark Coudray Coudray explains how to use your Website to stand out from the competition and convert sales prospects into profit centers. A lmost all of the business owners I know are on the perpetual search to increase profits. And why shouldn’t they? They’ve felt the pressure from declining profits for quite some time now. But when I ask how they plan on increasing their profits, the most common response is to cut expenses. I wince each time I hear this, because the answer isn’t really an answer at all. Cost cutting is low-hanging fruit. Significant fat in the process is long gone. If some costs can still be reduced, the resulting gains are almost always short term, with the future consequences to be dealt with when they arise. Cost reduction comes with severe consequences to the foundation of the company. I’m thinking about labor cost reduction and elimination or deferral of maintenance to the equipment. Cost reduction to supplies and materials carries the risk of product inconsistency and unpredictable failure. The seeds you sow for future breakdown are usually far more costly than the gains. The short-term view of how to increase profits is almost always tactical. It involves promotions, sales, and events. In short, the value delivered to your customer base is not really substantive and, most importantly, it usually can’t be repeated. It has to be replaced with some other gimmick pulled out of thin air. As an example, the retail market has the perpetual Going Out of Business or Everything Must Go sale. Don’t get me wrong. There’s a place for this kind of activity, but it shouldn’t be the core of your plan to increase profits. Any profit gain from these kinds of sales is short lived, and you’ll work extremely hard to achieve it. You must sell and work harder to deliver the profit. Worse, you run the risk of cannibalizing your future revenue and profit stream with low-margin, artificially motivated tricks. Fixing the funnel The more prudent, but difficult, path is to think strategically. This involves looking deeper into your own organization and your customer base. Most of the owners I talk to say they have too many peaks and valleys or they can’t predict sales cycles or sales volume. Both of these realizations mean the sales funnel or pipeline is either broken or never existed in the first place. 12 screenprinting Mark A. Coudray is president of Coudray Graphic Technologies, San Luis Obispo, CA. He has served as a director of (SGIA) and as chairman of the Academy of Screen Printing Technology. Coudray has authored more than 250 papers and articles over the last 20 years, and he received the SGIA’s Swormstedt Award in 1992 and 1994. He can be reached via e-mail at coudray@coudray.com. The sales trend today has shifted to the Web. A recent survey sponsored by yp.com showed than 92% of consumers start their search for a local vendor on the Web, but 74% ended up purchasing locally and not with an online purchase. This is huge. It means that more than nine out of ten prospects start online. Yet, when I look at the typical business-tobusiness Website, nine out of ten fail—and fail miserably. This is a bold statement, but let me explain. When someone hits your site, the main goal you have is to engage them to the point where you gain their contact information. Without it, they’re just a shopper browsing and you’re the floor salesman who asks, “Can I help you find something?” The answer is almost always, “No, just looking.” This is what needs to change. The sequence should be designed as follows: 1. Get targeted traffic to the Website. 2. Deliver engaging content that adds presale value (useful but incomplete information). 3. Conversion 1, where they give you their contact information, usually an e-mail address, and permission to market to them (opt-in). 4. Regular delivery of increasingly useful information over the next several days or weeks. 5. Conversion 2, which includes direct contact and an order. The beauty of the Internet is we can track everything at every step of the process. We can split test offers and content on a continuous basis until everything is optimized. The tracking aspect is all about engineering the salesfunnel process, and it is critical to your success. Traditional business owners have never really thought about this. They look at their Website as an electronic brochure and little more. Here’s something to consider. Suppose you’re a medium-sized company with 1000 customers. Your annual sales are $2,000,000. This means the value of a customer is $2000 per year. Your traditional salesperson concentrates mostly on keeping their existing customers happy and tries to grow the business there. There’s no problem with that, but you need new customers. http://www.yp.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Screen Printing - February/March 2013

Screen Printing - February/march 2013
Contents
Editorial Insights
New Products
Increasing Your Profit
Image Enhancement: Better Files, Cost Savings
Prime Prints
P-O-P Primer
Making the Cut
Shoptalk
Industry Update
Distributor/Dealer Directory
Opportunity Exchange
Advertising Index

Screen Printing - February/March 2013