Building a Relationship with Your Printer

One day last summer a client started railing against the printing industry. He’d just had a bad experience with a local printer, and he proceeded to tell me everything that was wrong with the entire industry. “They’re medieval!” he ranted. “Printing is like alchemy – the printer disappears with your job behind the pressroom doors, and you have no idea what’s going on back there! They communicate nothing.”

He had reason to complain, for the printer had indeed delivered substandard quality on his all-important corporate brochure. The experience had left him jaundiced in his opinion about every printer. I knew it would take a long time before he trusted any printer (he still doesn’t), and I wish I’d met him before he printed that job. The outcome could have been – should have been – much different.

Unfortunately, his reaction isn’t uncommon. If you’re lucky enough to have found a printer who’s responsive to your firm’s needs, you’re in luck. You’ll stick with this printer despite small infractions. In fact, you’re more apt to forgive him minor trespasses if, for the most part, you’ve been able to count on him to deliver in the past. But if, like my client, you have had one bad experience with a commercial printer, you might condemn the whole industry.

What a shame.

Printers do want your experiences with them to be successful and satisfying. You can help guarantee such an outcome by working with them in deliberate ways. This article outlines actions that you can take to ensure win-win partnerships with your print vendors.

Not all printers are created equal

The single most important step you can take to ensure a happy printer-client relationship is perhaps the hardest: choosing the right printer. Currently there are more than 51,000 printing plants in the US, according to the Printing Industries of America. So while you have plenty of companies to choose from, your choice is made difficult by two facts: they’re everywhere, and they’re all different.

Printers have specialties. Depending on their equipment, and how much of it they have, they can print some things very well and others not so well – if at all. In addition to general commercial printers, there are printers who specialize in books, forms, magazines and periodicals, financial/legal, packaging and finishing. Every printer has a niche. Some do 4-color printing, while others do 1- or 2-color. There are digital printers who focus on very short runs and quick turnaround times, as well as web printers, who do very long runs – and printers who do everything in between.

Services vary widely among printers, too. The largest commercial printers offer comprehensive services, like graphic design and desktop publishing, mailing and fulfillment, Web site design and hosting, and digital content management. Small print shops typically print low to medium runs and may also offer some copying capabilities, but they offer little beyond these standard services.

Because quality and service differ from shop to shop, the onus is on you, the customer, to find the best print vendor for your particular needs.

Here’s how I’d start my search for that perfect printer: ask trusted colleagues who they use. Meet the print salesperson and interview him or her. If a particular printer has experience with the type of job you need printed in the quantities you require, you’re off to a good start.

It may be business – but it’s also personal!

Make your choice of printer a personal one. Find yourself a salesman or saleswoman you can relate to. Since your goal is to develop a long-term business relationship, you should think to yourself, “Do I like talking to this person?” It’s vital that you feel you can trust and respect your print salesman. If you can’t, the relationship is doomed. And keep in mind that you can always call the company president or sales manager and ask about switching to another sales rep, if you like the company but not the salesperson.

The less you know about printing, the more you need to depend on your salesman to educate you, guide you through the production process, and suggest alternatives to your printing jobs. Find out early on if your salesman will be offering customized solutions to your company’s needs. Make sure he or she will be responsive to you, the buyer. Will you need to see him in person on a regular basis? Do you plan to communicate with him via email? Do you want to send your jobs digitally? Discuss all of these issues early on, and see how he responds. A good sales rep is flexible and accommodating.

If you have very little experience with printing, you need a salesman with lots of experience in the field. Jim Hamilton of Quebecor World Universal Press in Westwood, MA, puts it this way: “All through the production cycle, a responsive printer keeps the customer in touch with the schedule and at ease that commitments will be met.”

Don’t be afraid to lean on your salesman. He expects it; he welcomes it. Hamilton adds, “That’s the key relationship that all commercial printers strive for, to win a customer’s confidence and then produce on a consistent and reoccurring basis with that customer.”

Keep your printer in the loop.

Every print job is unique. Printing is customized manufacturing – absolutely nothing is “off the shelf.” The success of your print jobs depends in large part on your communicating early and often with your printer. Think of your printer as a creative partner, not just a go-between.

You want a successful print job? Then include your printer in your earliest discussions about a particular project. When appropriate, bring the printer into your marketing meetings. Often the printer will recommend steps you can take to make your job print easier, faster, and smoother.

The single biggest mistake that consumers make with their print jobs is failure to involve the printer soon enough. Once the job is sent to the printer and the deadline has been set (by you), all he can do is print the materials as best he can with what you supplied. Give him a chance to be proactive. Involve him when the job is in the planning stage.

Even the most talented graphic designers sometimes fail to talk to printers early enough. Digital file preparation is complex, and no two designers “build” a job alike. So printers have had to staff up with their own digital prepress specialists to work with these files. This stage, called preflighting, costs you time and money. So plan ahead and save!

How you prepare your files is very, very important to a printer. The platform of choice among printers is still the Mac computer. Programs like Word, PowerPoint, and Publisher were not created for output on a commercial press. They cause extra work at the printer’s, and extra time/cost for you.

It’s best to talk with your printer before you or your designer starts building your file digitally, to be sure the printer can work with what you plan on sending. Often the printer can make recommendations that will save you time and aggravation.

Some recommendations can save you a lot of money, too. Once, as a corporate print buyer, I had a print salesman recommend a different format for a series of annual reports I was producing. By altering the size by a fraction of an inch, I was able to save my firm tens of thousands of dollars. The salesman had my best interest in mind – and as a result, I gave him tons of new business for years to come. I knew he would continue to think of ways to make my jobs run smoother.

Insist on being kept informed as well. If all you care about is when the job will be delivered, that’s OK, too. For more complex jobs, you’ll need more detail about press proofs and delivery dates and drop shipments. Let your printer know you need him to communicate with you.

Play fair

Since every job is a custom job, respect that it can take time to print something well. Don’t cry wolf and impose artificial deadlines, when in reality you could wait another day or two. If you want to develop a good relationship with your printers, be honest and straightforward with them, recommends Kitty St. Sauveur, a partner with Alliance Print Group in Boston.

Ms. St. Sauveur also points out that most printers work very hard for their clients, and that the Web-influenced trend of instant delivery of all kinds of goods and services have made it very difficult for printers to shorten their manufacturing processes. Still, they’re working very hard to meet their customers’ needs.

The devil is in the details

Every detail about a print job affects its price: the format, number of pages, quantity, inks, paper, folds, and so on. Put someone who’s detail-conscious in charge of your printing. As a client, it’s your responsibility to compile these details, called specs (for specifications), for the printer. Get your designer or even the printer to help, then use these specs to request an estimate before you sent a job to print.

Please remember a printer is not a mind reader! As the specs change, and they will, so will the estimate. Many clients have experienced sticker shock when a final printing invoice arrives. Usually, it happens because they failed to keep the printer current with the job. What started out as an 8-page, 2-color sales brochure developed into a 32-page, 4-color brochure, complete with varnish, more expensive paper, and a die cut cover. This happens all the time. Somehow the printer always shoulders the blame.

Don’t be intimidated by “printer-speak”

Printing is highly technical and rather mysterious. Unless you’re used to dealing with printers, chances are you’ll find it all a bit intimidating, since printers speak their own language.

If you don’t understand something, ask for clarification in English. Printers are used to educating consumers. Some are better at it than others. If your salesman isn’t willing or able to assume this key role for you, find yourself another printer.

You don’t need to know how to run a printing press, but you should understand how the process works. Two of the best questions you can ask your printer are “Is there a more efficient way to print this job,” and “Are any of my job specs going to cause me problems that you’re aware of?”

Be clear about responsibilities

Clarify what your role is vs. the printer’s. A businessman I know had his printer do some minor typesetting on a job at the last minute. The blueprint, which is a proof that a printer typically sends to a customer before a job is printed, was sent to the client for his approval and sign-off. The client failed to notice a typo that the printer had typeset, and he gave his “OK to print.”

You can guess what happened next. When the job delivered, the client noticed the typo. “Who’s responsible?” I was asked. “You are,” I replied. His signature on the blueprint gave the printer a green light to proceed.

This illustrates a key point. Be clear about who’s responsible for what in the print production process. Proofreading ranks way up there among a client’s responsibilities. Don’t assume the printer will proofread anything. Better to designate someone on your staff as the “designated proofer” to ensure that every word, every comma, every name and every number is accurate.

One step you can easily take to define responsibilities is the creation of a production schedule, complete with the name of who’s in charge of what step. Since printing is often the result of the concentrated effort of a team of true professionals – you, a designer, maybe a writer, and the printer – careful scrutiny must be employed to be certain that all of the steps are assigned appropriately. A written schedule will help keep all the team members on the same track, and jobs like proofreading won’t fall through the cracks.

Pick a printer who’ll go the extra mile

To be perfectly honest, most printers can print “pleasing” color. If you gather a handful of printed pieces together, you won’t be able to tell who printed what. This is why service is so important when working with a printer.

Competition among printers is fierce these days. Printers are beefing up their value-added services to distinguish themselves from one another. It’s good news for consumers, and bad news for the printers who sit idly by.

The recent development of Web-based printing services is also new competition for printers. Some of these dot.com printers are online retailers, allowing consumers to order business cards and other stationery products from the comfort of their desktop. Others offer relationship management software, which promises to streamline the otherwise inefficient print-buying process.

These changes, plus the dramatic advances in digital printing technology, make your choice of print provider even more significant. You should find a printer who understands your full range of print and distribution needs, whether they’re paper-based or, more likely, a combination of paper and digital solutions.

Consumers will continue to benefit by these changes in the industry. Printers will become more customer-centric. They’ll broaden their services into Web publishing and distribution. You might need fewer printers as your company matures, but you’ll need printers who can deliver a whole lot more than ink on paper.

© Margie Gallo Dana