That’s not to discredit the 4,000-staff group’s traditional approach. The old regime was hugely successful, says group marketing director Rob Kelly. You couldn’t really knock that, but there was a change in the marketplace. Market conditions were changing rapidly and St Ives’ prevailing strategy was no longer relevant. Print managers had come along as single-source suppliers and were winning many of the big contracts. For St Ives to compete, the whole would have to be greater than the sum of its parts.

Six become one
The taskforce responsible for turning St Ives into a single business with a combined sales strategy was spearheaded by chief executive commercial Simon Ward. He joined the company as head of SP Group, which St Ives bought in 2004. The point-of-sale specialist’s Redditch headquarters became a conduit linking the six divisions, while the site also expanded, moving into litho with a five-colour KBA Rapida 205 in late 2006 and becoming the beta site for the new Inca Onset flatbed digital printer in mid-2007. And as the group sales strategy has matured, Ward’s star has risen – he joined the board of directors in late 2006.

Ward is renowned for his outspoken views on PM and while he may recognise similarities between the new, unified St Ives and PM, he explains one major difference: Print management goes in and says, ‘We’ll go to the cheapest places and ensure you’ll always get the cheapest print’. My idea was that, instead, we say: ‘Surely you want the best. Why don’t we give you the best, join it together and bring you bigger savings. Let me make money on print – because otherwise I’ll go bust – and I’ll re-engineer the end-to-end process and save you real money.’

Did the idea work? The stellar client line-up of Marks & Spencer (M&S), Royal Mail and Sainsbury’s – all on board thanks to the group sell – proves it did. To understand the strategy clearly, you need to go back to the early stages of the integration of SP Group. Group sales really began six months in, when Ward was challenged to make [St Ives] work together as one group, as opposed to six completely separate businesses, he says. Managers had no common link with one another, which meant they deliberately didn’t want to cross-sell, he explains. A huge overhaul was needed and, over the next year, St Ives began effectively print managing itself as Ward tried to break down historic barriers and win hearts and minds. I wasn’t very popular at the time, he admits.

But this was a business challenge, not a popularity contest, and at a pre-Ipex event in November 2005, we stood up and said ‘we are now one business’, says Ward. Any lingering doubts across the divisions evaporated in the face of the first big group win: the £25m M&S contract.

It was proof that the group product could work, says Ward. Unlike the media coverage surrounding some of St Ives’ more recent group wins, the M&S deal went relatively unreported, serving more as an internal rallying cry than a marketing effort. It was the first victory in a self-proclaimed march on iconic brands, for whom the ‘best not cheapest’ pitch carried the most weight.

Ward points out that ‘best’ doesn’t necessarily mean more expensive. The more money I save M&S in this business, the higher my profit margins, he says. So there’s an incentive to actually improve and reduce their spend. It’s all about making money – turnover is irrelevant. Ward, true to controversial form, tells customers: The best way to save money on print is to not print it. Why don’t you print less? The focus on continual cost savings echoes the PM sell, while hopefully engendering longer-term relationships, customer loyalty and healthy business.

With M&S under its belt, this newly empowered St Ives went from one big win to the next. We’ve pitched for four things as the group and won them all – that’s M&S, Royal Mail, Sainsbury’s and Dixons, says Ward. We said no to Dixons. We won it and got into the operational assessment and realised it probably wasn’t right for us, so we exited it quite quickly.

Does this mean St Ives is in a position to cherry-pick from a list of the UK’s biggest and best print customers? We don’t pitch for much as the group. We know who we want to go for next year. We’ll spend six to 12 months producing proper market research on them so when pitch, we go in on a level playing field, says Ward. We pitch to win.

Pitching to win
It’s difficult not to be carried along by the confidence, especially when it’s backed up by some of the UK’s most attractive contracts. When news broke in June that Sainsbury’s long-term supplier Communisis had lost its contract with the retail giant, rumours abounded as to which rival had scooped the deal. It came as a surprise to some that St Ives had clinched the estimated £20m-per-year client. A shock to some, perhaps, but not Ward: With Sainsbury’s, we didn’t go in to have a go, we went in to win it, end of story. We’d done so much research that we told them exactly what was wrong and how to solve it. We’d spend six months researching it. That was easy. If Ward seems glib about such a triumph, it’s a confidence tempered with pragmatism. It’d be wrong to say we can win them at will, but we’ve certainly won everything we’ve pitched for, because we did it properly. Flush with this success, St Ives is putting the brakes on the group sell for the next six months as it beds in Royal Mail and Sainsbury’s, which it began transitioning in early September.

In the meantime, the company is still a collection of print businesses with vastly different capabilities spread across the UK; selling into their traditional markets as individual companies remains a key focus. Group commercial sales director Ian Ogden’s team is in charge of sector-specific local sales. It’s about taking the strength of each of the sectors and identifying where we’ve got opportunities and gaps that will helps us in terms of sales and revenue, says Ogden. And thanks to the open culture, Ogden’s team can look to cross-sell to any customer in any division with confidence. We can say to the customer with absolute conviction that if he wants point-of-sale, a magazine or some direct mail, we can do it, he adds.

This can-do attitude is now entrenched across the group. Rob Kelly says employees value the safety of working for a successful business, and have belief in senior management. The firm is looking to move up the value chain through its marketing services consultancy, which it launched in May – the ideas room at Redditch swells with samples of dynamic point-of-sale to inspire customers’ marketing. St Ives has added asset management software DNA and PoS service Retail Thinking. It also wields around £25m in straight PM, for which St Ives is the prime service provider, under-pinned by trade suppliers, for example stamp and philatelic specialists for the Royal Mail contract. The optimism is also echoed on the shortlist for the 2008 PrintWeek Awards, on which St Ives appears 13 times – a record both for the company and the awards themselves.

In the past two years, Ward claims group sales have brought in £150m to £160m, proving that the group strategy was the right move, and that with innovative tactics, a printer can hold its own.

INSPECTION LESSONS: TAKING A GROUP APPROACH
• Few UK printers have the size and scope of St Ives, but there are wider lessons to be learned from its group sales strategy
• It can be easier to achieve larger goals by combining the resources of multiple departments
• Employ a single team to bring together disparate parts of the business and manage communication between them
• Buy-in from managers is vital. Removing cultural and historic barriers between departments can be the biggest challenge
• Internally promote any successes or savings brought about by a unified approach. This will help prove the strategy is working