Starting with the most obvious question: what is business development?

“Development is pre-empting what the market wants next and delivering it rather than reacting to market conditions,” says A Local Printer managing director Ray Burn. “If you are reacting to market conditions you don’t understand your business. If you don’t understand it you can’t exploit it.”

For Greystone director David Mitchell, as well as understanding, you need action and to be willing to play the game: “You don’t develop if you do nothing, business development is about going forwards,” he says. “If you stand still you’re shot, you get commoditised. It’s about being able to compete.”

For Mitchell it’s about understanding where that growth will come from. “Ask yourself: Do you need to take work from other people to grow your market share? Or is it about new ideas to grow a new market?”
If you identify it as the latter then he, and the rest of the panel, all agree on how to find those ideas. “I’ve always found business development comes from listening to the customer,” he says. “If you can find pain in a customer’s life and find a solution you will have a sustainable business. And you can be innovative and move on and find the next area of pain.”

The idea of finding and relieving customer pain chimed with the panel’s experiences. “It needs to be more than a need,” adds Park Communications managing director Alison Branch. “If it’s just a need, the customer can be too busy to put the investment in. They need something to be a real aggravation.”

Feel the pain
Leach Colour sales and marketing director Graham Evans says: “We use a sales process to uncover those painful needs and get clients to feel that pain – asking the right questions at the right time and not jumping in with a solution too soon. You work like a policeman trying to uncover if a suspect actually did it. You uncover implied needs, not just the explicit ones.”

It’s something those from outside the industry see as an inherent problem. The Last Four Feet’s director Neil Johnson, who comes from a marketing background, says: “Print companies get caught in the ‘me-too’ trap. They’re so fixated on quoting for everything that the client uses, they don’t take a step back and ask ‘what are you trying to achieve?’. Print is a derived demand. No one actually wants the piece of paper with ink on it. They want it for what it’s going to do for them in terms of brand communication or driving footfall. The traditional print sell of ‘isn’t this a fantastic poster? How many would you like?’ doesn’t work. You’ve got to ask ‘why do you want a poster?’.”

Pensord managing director Tony Jones traces the problem back to sales people. “One of the things that struck me when I first entered print in 1994 was that I’d never seen such a poor level of sales people, and I don’t think it’s much better now,” he says.

Relationships and solutions
Howitt sales director Nick Barbeary points out that sales shouldn’t take all the blame. “The culture of lots of businesses is driven by manufacturing and keeping presses occupied,” he says. “So sales are focused on filling slots in the production schedule.

“That’s where print has lost its way and where firms like print management firms have developed because they focus on long-term relationships and solutions.”

What can be learnt from the print managers?

“It’s a long sales cycle that can take six to nine months, and you need different types of people at different stages,” says HH Associates group managing director Robert Macmillan. “You need to speak to marketing directors and procurement directors and both will want completely different things and have different reports that you have to understand.”

Johnson adds: “You’ve got to be able to speak to both print buyers and creatives with the right tone of voice. You’ve got to talk to the print buyer because they write the cheques and determine what goes through your presses. But there’s got to be a strategic contact at the client too, because the marketing budget is going to be set by the managing director and the marketing director.”

It may not be the same person dealing with each person at a client. Macmillan says: “You need to bring in different people, as there’s no one person who can work with all these different types of people. Once you win a contract, it’s the people you put onto a team that drive that volume. When people sign a contract there’s no guarantee of the spend. There’s an opportunity, but you have to make it happen. People are really important in driving contracts.”

The people theme will be picked up later, but going back to those lucrative multi-million-pound contracts, Johnson says: “Traditionally print companies have gone out for jobs. In my Bezier days we went from £62.5m to nearly £90m when I left three years later. And that was done through contractual new business. Once you’ve got that opportunity you can grow turnover by millions, not thousands, and in a very quick time frame.”

Burn points out that talk of multi-million-pound contracts isn’t appropriate to most printers, himself included, but there are simple business development techniques to apply.

“We operate in a market that is served by printers with less than 20 staff and it’s worth £3bn-£4bn in the UK,” he says. “It’s dominated by two types of business – owner-operators or franchises. They’re all chasing the same bread and butter day-to-day print.”

One leg bad
But he contends that it’s not the most dynamic or sophisticated market in terms of its business development. “The managing director gets a contract because he’s got a mate up at the golf club,” he claims. “It’s not beyond the wit of man to step out of that.

“My customers don’t see print as some sort of complex, bespoke craft like some of my peers do. To them, print is just another commodity that they don’t understand and that should be easier to buy.
“There are 130,000 people in the UK looking for what I sell on Google every month. I’ll let someone else run around knocking on doors. For me the action is all on the first page of Google. That’s my USP.”

Burn makes the point that having a niche or a USP is nice, but it makes sense to have more than one.
“You need more than one leg or your business will fall over,” he says. “Two legs isn’t much better but you’d be surprised how many printers try to get by on one.”

In A Local Printer’s case, the three legs are its online operations, supplying print to local businesses and what Burn terms “mini print management”.

“It falls between the bigger guys – the £300,000 contracts that they’re not interested in – and the local print firms who couldn’t service it,” he says. “If you can find it, there is always a no-man’s-land too small for the big guys and too big for the small guys.”

Same meat, different gravy
Leach’s Evans highlights his firm’s multi-stringed approach. “We need the volume from retail and the margins from heritage – a balanced portfolio,” he says.

“It’s pitching our company to different segments in ways that are totally opposed. It’s what the Americans call ‘same meat, different gravy’. If one minute you’re getting a big campaign out for Asda and the next you’re doing a bespoke graphic for the V&A, you need a very different mindset. It’s about knowing the standards and expectations of each.”

During the two-hour discussion, the conversation was dominated by ‘people issues’ and the importance of having the right individuals and teams in a business. Those individuals should be supported with appropriate career development and rewards. Individuals are important, but a multi-disciplined team is vital for dealing with clients on different levels and at different times during the lifetime of a contract.

Mitchell says: “I wouldn’t have the same person facing off to Saatchi as to Barclays Bank. The bank wants to talk to someone who understands Sarbanes-Oxley and compliance; his issues are completely different to an agency’s. We’ve not completely understood that as an industry, we’ve thought ‘got to fill the presses’, we haven’t thought about having the right people. If you employ someone from the sector you’re targeting there’s less to teach them.”

Alison Branch from Park Communications believes that however good your client-facing teams are, management has to have a strong relationship with the customer as part of a successful business development strategy.

“We’ve learnt from experience that you can deliver a fantastic service that the customer is delighted with,” she says. “But unless you are really in touch with the decision makers, you can’t anticipate how the business is going to change over the next six months or year. You can lose business because the client has a political or strategic issue and they have assumed that you will be unable to satisfy their future need.

“We had a client who had to have something printed in Italy and we were able to get it printed in Italy for them. In another case we weren’t close enough and lost half a million pounds worth of business when the customer decided it had to go to global production. They had made the decision before we were aware that it was a possibility.

Branch has a simple solution: “We make it a point to meet up with our top 20 customers at least once a quarter, and at every meeting we come up with at least one added-value solution and find out what’s coming up in their business.”

Mitchell adds that as well as working out what is driving your customer’s business it’s worth finding out what drives the individuals your staff deal with.

“We’ve always encouraged our people to look at who they are facing off to and what are they measured on, what gets them their bonuses?”

The last word goes to Mitchell “When winning new business or servicing clients it all comes down to the calibre of the people, and paying for them.”

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The sponsor
This round-table on business development was sponsored by Kodak Graphic Communications Group.

Contact
www.kodak.com 01923 233366