Print sales staff in the US are under attack for their focus on smaller print buyers while they shy away from trying to sell to the bigger businesses.
A survey of US print buyers revealed that the top five all spent more than billion dollars each on print. However it also revealed that print sales staff spent most of their time focusing on the low value, low margin, harder sell, higher cost to produce print jobs.
According to trade magazine Printing Impressions which commissioned the Print Buyer 100, “Without a clue, most (print sales staff) compete destructively for work among the 113,252 smallest buyers, the demand from which is in a range from a few thousand dollars a year up to a million or so. The average is $0.8m, or a paltry 0.001 per cent when compared to the best 1-in-1,132 places to call. If our marketplace is a coin, this space is tails at less than half of all printing; 45.7 per cent to be exact. Worse, it is a harder sell with higher costs and lower margins.”
The survey recommended that print sales staff focus on ‘top companies whose multiple buyers are in professional, full-time positions, in contrast to the frustrations dealing with part-time buyers, often with little or no knowledge of the processes involved.’
Darr Kartychak at Intermedia in Princeton, NJ, commented, “Do not be intimidated by company size; the big buyers do not bite.”
The US Postal Service is the biggest print buyer in the country, spending US$1.26bn, soft drinks outfit Pepsico is at number two, followed by Apple, then Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson and Google, all of whom spend more than US$1bn on print.
The USPS vendor base exceeds 3,000 printers and converters, including several Canadian suppliers, US$500,000 each is the average the USPG is spending, with everything from stamps to tape supplied.
Pepsico is No. 2 in print with the group overseeing over $1.1bn in metal decorating, labels, closures, litho folding cartons, carriers, neckers, outdoor, FSIs, ROP, vehicle wraps and the largest variety and volume of POS/POP of any company in any category on earth. The number of print-related suppliers, including twin-plant packaging operations, is more than 2,500.
Two of the top five are digital players, Apple and Google, who are both spending more than US$1bn a year on print.
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