web-2-print and your team's perceptions
Embracing client web-2-print involves changing the way in which some of your team work. Your sales director, account managers, creatives and technical people will all have a different take on web-2-print. Some may even hold views that oppose web-2-print.
It’s worth stripping back to basics the dynamics and drivers for the different roles within your business and looking at their motivations and fears:
Managing Director
Web-2-print can help you win new business. It also makes client relationships ‘sticky’, cementing the client’s relationship with your company. However, adopting web-2-print involves a new skill set for the team to learn, and the gestation period for new web-2-print clients can be longer than with conventional web-2-print.
Sales Director
On the one hand web-2-print provides a new service to pitch to clients, develop new skills and guards against potential client loss to other printers more capable online. On the other hand, it involves adapting to the different nature of selling these systems and moving elements of the client relationship online, which makes the client relationship less portable should the Sales Director move on.
Account Manager
For the Account Manager it adds to their skill set and their medium to long career development prospects. However, as with the Sales Director, web-2-print reduces the ‘transferability’ of the client.
Creative
When designed in-house, web-2-print provides a medium for the proliferation of their design. It also provides an opportunity for them to work with larger brands. However creatives could see this as the erosion of a Mac Operator’s role.
Technical
Technical roles in print are becoming more difficult to find – so ‘techies’ are more likely to be positive about new initiatives like this. If techies get involved in the template creation process, this adds to their importance – especially if an existing technical skill set is required. On the other hand it could be added pressure if the techie is the only person within the company able to build templates.
So how do you communicate the benefits of web-2-print to your internal stakeholders?
We’ll discuss this in our next blog post.
