When high quality and great service are the market norm, all that’s left is to sell on price.  Or so the folks at Booklet Binding thought - until they figured out how they could really make money.

By Joshua Hyatt

“Everybody had a customer that needed a special break on pricing.”

“Our customers would say, ‘This is what the competition is quoting us,’ so we had to lower the price to get the work.”

... “picked up customers by offering the kind of service that their rivals—umpteenth-generation family businesses —never considered.  “They were very forward-looking.”

As they talked to Landiak, the owners hit upon a disturbing truth: they really didn’t know how to make money anymore.

When they interviewed Mark N. Landiak for the job, he just asked questions.  “What kind of relationship do you have with your customers?”

“What results are you hoping to get of training?  What do you think your real business issues are?”  He challenged every assumption they had—about their competitors and their markets, their employees and their services.  “What he did was make me tell myself what I needed to hear,” says Patrevito, 43. 

Now almost three years later—with the company expecting to hit about $23 million in sales in 1996 and with profit margins up about 50%...

You may think you know exactly what commoditization looks like: increasing volumes, decreasing margins.  But there are other, subtler signs and spotting them is only the beginning.

Beyond that, Patrevito and Kosowski were always looking for ways to help customers, typically small printers, make smarter business decisions.

That kind of informal advice may have been as valuable to their customers as the fact that Booklet Binding could perfect-bind a book as thin as one-sixteenth of an inch.

In most modern-day markets, where laser-fast competition breeds spontaneous commoditization, “expertise is the better mousetrap.”

Salespeople have to battle constant price objections.

“If your salespeople are down to asking, ‘What’s it going to take to get your business today?’ then they’ve basically said they don’t have any worth,” says Landiak.  “It’s not the customers’ job to care about your margins.  And they won’t.”

Brags Larry Bralich, displaying a hint of sadistic pleasure, ‘I barbecued him.  He said things I knew were way wrong.  I felt bad after I did it.’

To consistently win profitable business, Booklet Binding would have to surround its commoditized service with enough value to make it seem to be worth more.  How might it do that?  By, as Landiak puts it, “uncomplicating the world for its customers, by showing them how to increase revenue or decrease cost or how to retain their own customer base.”

There had to be added value in giving customers the help they no longer had in-house.

“If customers perceive that you have a high level of expertise, and it can help the, you’re worth more to them,” says Landiak.

The goal of that program, which began in June 1993, was “to take them out of the price mind-set to one of selling based on what the customer feels is an added value,” Landiak says.

First among those tools was an account profile, a document that would enable the company to analyze what would enable the company to analyze what “share of customer” it was getting, as Landiak termed it.  The goal was not only to get a snapshot of the business the customer did with Booklet Binding but also to learn more about the customers’ overall business so that the salesperson could offer more insight.

Somehow, the salespeople would have to turn themselves into experts.

The resultant expertise has also brought Booklet binding’s salespeople closer to customers—literally.  Several have been invited to customer sites to give presentations on various topics.  Chalifoux met with the sales staff of a small commercial printer to lecture on mailing.  Autin made a sales call with a customer to help explain personalization, which involves the ink-jet spraying of any individualized information—in this case, phone numbers—on a direct-mail piece.  “That’s the best,” Autin says proudly, “when your customer thinks enough of you to share his customer with you.”

“We’re getting higher margins more frequently.”

“When there’s a crack in the door, our salesperson now opens it,” says Kosowski.  “Salespeople used to be afraid of what was on the other side.  The training has changed that.”