Give your clients a simpler life

In this issue’s interview, GI Solutions’ Patrick Headley talks about the increasing need to make clients’ lives easier.

He cited the example of hybrid mail, and the opportunities it offers, but there are plenty of others that spring to mind.

While it seems a blindingly obvious observation on some levels – after all who wouldn’t want a simpler life – it’s something that as an industry we’re not always particularly good at.

In fact, it’s probably fair to say that we’re occasionally guilty of doing our damnedest to over-complicate things in a vain attempt to impress with the complexity of our offering.

Print can, of course, be a highly technical process and there’s no doubt some clients take some pleasure in this and love to get involved with the intricacies of the process or project and like nothing more than poring over a seemingly endless array of options. But the likelihood of the person that has that level of expertise also being the decision maker are getting slimmer by the year.

Increasingly it’s the marketing director or managing director that has to buy into a new print initiative because, rightly or WRONGLY, digital marketing is seen as the simple, safe and lower cost option.

So we need to make sure that whenever possible we talk about print in simple terms like value, effectiveness, ROI and bottom line impact and use less of the language that would be more at home on the factory floor or in production meetings.

Because if we’re ever going to truly move away from client conversations always being framed by discussions about cost rather than value, then we need to talk less about the process and more about the possibilities.