Stop Selling the Product, Start Selling the Certainty

I had a bit of a disaster with a takeaway order tonight.

It was a new place with great branding, but the operations were a complete shambles. The food was late. It was cold. The order was incorrect. It was a classic case of style over substance.

It reminded me of a trap a lot of printers fall into.

The manufacturing mindset trap

We are a manufacturing industry at heart. We love making things. We obsess over the product. We worry about the print quality, the paper stock, the lamination, and the binding. We look at a finished brochure and see a work of art.

We assume the customer sees the same thing. We think that if the product is good enough, the customer will be happy.

But the customer experience starts way before the box lands on their desk. And usually, the customer isn't buying the brochure. They are buying the outcome that the brochure delivers.

If the delivery is late for their event, the quality of the print doesn't matter. The boxes could be filled with gold, but if they arrive after the delegates have gone home, they are worthless.

You cannot print your way out of bad service

If the communication is poor and the client has to chase you three times for an update, the nice paper stock doesn't matter. They are already stressed and angry.

That restaurant gave me a free dessert to make up for the four-hour wait. It didn't work. I was already frustrated. The food was irrelevant because the process of getting it had been so painful.

In print, you can't paper over cracks with a discount on the next run. If you miss a deadline for a product launch, that client is gone. No amount of apology vouchers will bring them back.

You need to shift your focus from the end product to the process that gets it there.

Selling certainty

You need to sell certainty.

When a client hands over a file, they are handing over a problem. They are worried. Will it look right? Will it arrive on time? Will I get shouted at by my boss if this goes wrong?

Your job is to remove that worry.

You do that by having visible checkpoints. You do that by sending proactive updates so they don't have to chase you. You do that by hitting the deadline you promised, even if it means staying late because your system flagged a delay early enough to fix it.

Customers will forgive a lot of things. They understand that machines break and couriers get lost. But they will not forgive uncertainty. They will not forgive being kept in the dark.

Stop trying to impress them with your image and start impressing them with your consistency. That is how you build a business that lasts.

Book your discovery call today, and let's get started: https://calendly.com/theonlineprintcoach/30-min-discovery-call