Home | Subscribe | Contact Us | Advertise Home | Subscribe | Contact Us | Advertise
A manufacturer adds value by integrating sales and prepress
By Andy Brown
Capital Printing Corp. hands out laminated postcards that list best practices and common mistakes to consider when handling electronic art files. The cards are a useful reference tool for salespeople and a great marketing takeaway for end users.
Imagine the printing process is like catching a plane. The job order gets in a taxi with just enough time to drive to the airport, check in, go through security and board the aircraft. The distributor or salesperson is the taxi driver. Halfway to the airport, he pulls over and escorts the job order to a new taxi—your prepress technician. That taxi driver pulls onto the highway, and he discovers that the job order has forgotten its suitcase, its passport, its cell phone, which airline it’s flying and its itinerary. Furthermore, traffic is bottlenecked due to construction no one knew about. There’s no way this job order makes the flight. It has to reschedule for the next available one. By the way, the end user expecting the order to arrive on time is not happy.<
When a press goes down or too many rush orders come at once, some jobs are delayed. Those situations are inevitable, rare and difficult to anticipate. Delays more often occur because customers send unusable electronic art files. By the time the prepress department discovers the problems, it’s too late. The time it takes to fix the errors or ask the end user for new files is time the job could have been in production. Not only is the end user frustrated, these avoidable delays waste manufacturers’ time and money.
Bridging Prepress and Sales
To avoid holdups, files should be as clean as possible before they enter prepress. Printers have a choice—start training prepress technicians to sell, or start educating sales staff about basic prepress problems.
Capital Printing Corp., a manufacturer in Middlesex, N.J., chose the latter. It focuses on bringing its salespeople up to speed on common mistakes that end users make in file preparation. “When a job starts badly, it ends badly,” says Brett Russo, vice president of sales for Capital Printing Corp. “So much time is unnecessarily lost when problems are discovered in preflight that could have been solved during the initial file creation.” Because salespeople are the link between end users and the production process, responsibility lies with them to educate their clients about the printer’s capabilities.
For instance, a typical scenario involves end users who supply PDF files only. If they request a last minute change, the prepress department may be unable to make it. Salespeople who know that PDF files generally can’t be altered won’t make the mistake of guaranteeing their client that the changes can be made. Better yet, they’ll request at the beginning of the process that clients supply original files with their PDFs, in case changes need to be made. “Salespeople tend to make promises without knowing what their prepress departments can and can’t handle, and what they need to produce a job correctly,” says Russo. (For a list of common prepress issues, see sidebar on page 56).
Disorganized and mislabeled electronic files cause confusion and delays in prepress departments. Salespeople should emphasize the importance of organization to their clients and remind them to follow these three steps:
 |
1. Remove unused graphics, remnant text, empty pages, and unused colors and fonts. Flatten layers to remove “hidden” elements.
2. If changes to the file need to be made, make sure they’re clearly marked.
3. Supply printed laser copies or PDFs so prepress can visualize the job.
Source: Capital Printing Corp., www.capitalprintingcorp.com
Capital Printing Corp. trains its salespeople through a combination of formal and informal training. They attend mandatory, bimonthly meetings featuring representatives from different vendors. Additionally, they have informal conversations with
prepress technicians when questions arise. If salespeople start skirting a process or procedure, then the group will go through a refresher course. “When I first got there, there were no standard job forms,” says Russo. “The production team had to guess what was going on. Now there are standard job forms used by everyone. When production has the files, they know what they’re looking at and where to find the information they need.”
Marketing Advantage
Capital Printing Corp.’s transition began as a means to streamline internal processes, but training salespeople on prepress issues soon became an external marketing advantage. “There was a time when sales staffs were glorified delivery people, but now there’s too much competition for that to be the case,” says Russo. “We position our sales force as consultants. To do that, they have to consult in a way that clients become more reliant on them. Anything else isn’t sales. You can say that it is, but then you’re only as good as the lowest priced competitor.”
By consulting on prepress issues, Capital Printing Corp.’s sales staff saves clients time and money by making the production process smooth and error-free. When problems occur, salespeople know which questions to ask. If they can’t determine the answers, they know to bring their clients to the printing facility. “We position ourselves to ask what’s going wrong,” says Russo. “Then we bring clients to the shop and introduce them to the pressmen and the bindery managers. We let the clients say specifically what their problems are, and they feel like part of the team.”
For example, one of Capital Printing Corp.’s clients routinely sent bad files for a 90-page book. Sales staff figured out the problems and tried to explain to the client, but the files kept coming in wrong. Rather than give up on the client, the sales staff brought her into the plant and showed her exactly how the prepress department handled her files and demonstrated how she needed to prepare them. “She already knew how to do it,” says Russo. “She just didn’t know doing it that way was the easiest way for us.”
Andy Brown is managing editor of Print Solutions magazine. Email comments to abrown@PSDA.org.