It’s inescapable. Everywhere you look, people are talking about gas prices. From CNN’s daily recap of barrel prices to the Minnesota Twins reducing ticket prices to help save fans money at the pumps, it is absolutely unavoidable.

I recently asked whether or not any of you had considered corporate sponsored incentives for your employees, encouraging them to carpool or utilize public transportation (you’ll be glad to know that the Consistency Czarina and I are carpooling twice a week…Go Earth and go our wallets!). All of this hullabaloo got me thinking; in what ways can you utilize this frenzy to drive sales and increase customers? Chrysler has jumped on the bandwagon with their $2.99 gas. I recently was forwarded a campaign for a car dealership offering a free handgun or gas cards with purchase (yes, I said handgun). Have you contemplated ways to turn potential crisis into marketing prowess? If so, have you had success?

~Maren

The indirect goods industry is constantly referred to as one that is stubborn and resistant to change. I say this particularly in reference to their adoption of new technology. Case in point is the medium most of our customers are most comfortable using: the telephone. For a long time, when our customers had a problem, we wanted nothing more than for them to pick up the phone and call us.

Recently, however, Four51 has created a number of online tools (Discover Four51, Forum Four51, Access Four51…this very blog!) to enable customers to find quick answers to questions and interact with each other. In almost all cases, customers are getting their inquiries answered quicker than a traditional support telephone line could have ever accommodated and the results have been fantastic!

At Four51, we often walk the line of being on the edge of the technology trends and leaving our customers and prospects feeling confused and abandoned by our adoption of new technology. But as a forward-looking technology company, we know that it is important to push our customers and prospects in ways that will help their business grow and remain profitable.

Four51 is just about a decade old now and benefits from a well-balanced group of young employees who are consistently bringing fresh ideas to the table. In the marketing department alone we have been aggressively pursuing Search Engine Optimization, blogging and executing multimedia campaigns to help drive our presence out into the market.

The PSDA (Print Services & Distribution Association) has jumped on the technology bandwagon with us and is helping to educate the industry as a whole on the value of new technologies. The PSDA has created membership groups on LinkedIn, a site for professionals to grow their connections to business partners, clients and employees. They also have a site called Print University where members can go to get educational materials about the industry, read about sales and CSR training, and even download a podcast series to listen to at their convenience

Lately, the PSDA has helped to push the technology front even further by creating Print Junkie, a new social networking site for the printing industry. At printjunkie.net, members have free access to blogs, forums, news, events, tutorials, videos and photos all pertaining to the print industry. The site already boasts 200+ junkies!

As partners in crime, the PSDA is helping Four51 change the way customers interact with us and with each other. We all hope to see a dramatic shift in our customers’ resistance to adopting these new technologies as they realize the added value they bring to their businesses and their own customers.

Mara

Just as there are many salespeople and many different ways to sell, there are numerous ways to sell with Four51. However, some e-commerce sales tactics are universal.

Four51 now offers a two-day training session to help customers sell with Four51 and obtain the full benefits of e-commerce. This class is primarily designed for someone who has sales experience and wants to use Four51 to increase sales with current customers and sell to prospects. You will learn to build and use the demo site to achieve the presumptive close, successful strategies for closing prospects and the products and customers that work best with Four51.

You and your company will benefit from your ability to sell e-commerce products with confidence.

To learn more about our upcoming training sessions, click here.

Tom

A request for information came to me recently regarding variant identifiers. This person wanted to have two variables make up the identifier: Name and City. Easy enough, but the catch is that they wanted those two values separated by a comma. This is also quite easy, but the solution doesn’t jump right out at most so I thought I’d discuss it today.

First, obviously, you need two specs for the Name and City. Then create another text spec named Comma. Set the default value to: “, “. Note that I put a space after the comma.

Secondly, add the new Comma spec to your form. You can place it anywhere because we’re going to hide it from the user. Once in the form, go to your Advanced Scripting tab and hide the spec:

Finally, go to the Variant Identifier page and add the spec in the order you want to display them in the name.

All of your variants will be saved like so: Joe Nathan, Minneapolis.

Seth Godin had a great post on his blog the other day about small businesses and their tendency to be, well, whiny.

He shared an anecdote about ordering from a small company via Amazon. When he was told that he would have to wait a month for a re-shipment, he inquired why it would take so long. He received a reply that, at least in my interpretation, was pretty snarky: “Thank you for your inquiry. To answer your question we are NOT a big company like Amazon we are actually a small company, That is why it does take us a little longer than others.”

Seth’s point, with which I agree wholeheartedly, was that a small business needs to offer a great differentiator. Of course you will lag behind the big guys in some arenas, but you have to differentiate (positively!) somehow. In the case of this small business, if you can’t compete on the quickness of completing a re-order, why not do something else–something that your huge competitor can’t do–like including a signed card apologizing for the delay, calling personally to explain the situation, or adding a fun and unexpected extra to the package?

I know a lot of this community is comprised of small distributors who find themselves in situations where customers expect more than they can deliver. The internet brings opportunity in the door, but it just as quickly takes it away when someone posts a negative comment about you or finds comfort in the arms of your competitor.

There is a little tough love in this post, but embracing what might be a downfall and turning it into a positive experience for your customer can really make all the difference. I know I personally am more loyal to companies with which I feel I have a connection and I know that I’ll maintain my loyalty as long as they explain why they do things the way they do them.

For example, there’s a small mechanic shop that does all my oil changes. Because they have few people on staff, it can take forever to get a good appointment time. However, I once needed new tires and they didn’t have them in stock. Instead of telling me to come back in two weeks because they were just a small shop that couldn’t keep everything on hand, they found another store in the area that had the tires and sent one of their employees out to get them on the spot. Although they’re not always the convenient choice, that one memorable experience made me so loyal that I’ll never consider going elsewhere.

Don’t make excuses; make loyal customers.

Laura

I worked at one of the largest full-service ad agencies in the world for four years and, since jumping to the client side, I’ve hired and fired my share of agencies. So I have some knowledge of how they think and what motivates them.

Can an ad agency be the print service provider’s ally? Yes. Are there some agencies that never will be? Yes; and the second group might be larger than the first.

So how can you, the print service provider, quickly distinguish between the agency you can partner with and the agency that lumps you in with bird flu and the Ebola virus?

First, understand that agencies must do two things: manage accounts (AKA try to understand the client’s business and strategy) and be creative. In smaller shops, this can be one person. In larger shops, it’s two distinct groups. (Some larger agencies also have experts in online, PR, research and media, and while I’m sure they matter to their loved ones, they don’t matter for our purposes.)

Second, know that creative types rule the roost. They care about the creative product. Account types care about strategy and ensuring that the creative product is not only break-through but on strategy…and they really, really care about the client remaining a client.

Third, clients care–-or should care–-about how the creative ideas they paid for get executed in the field. That means account types will also care because the agency will often be blamed for marketing execution breakdowns in the field.

Here lies your opportunity. Seize the moment. Get with an account person and propose a partnership in which the agency develops the brand strategy and the creative, and your company is responsible for brand execution and brand integrity in the field. This is a key selling point of the Four51 application.

It will work, though alas not every time. So hone your qualifying skills, just like you would with any type of prospective client. Good selling.

Jim

In today’s world, everything has a price. When one calculates the time spent reviewing an invoice, obtaining payment approval, generating the check and the cost of the various programs and computers needed to document a transaction, it is no wonder that companies are looking for ways to reduce expenses in their back offices.

Sourcing print is the toughest part of the supply chain. By offering a customer your expertise in sourcing print and applying that knowledge to a customer’s entire supply chain, you can not only help the customer reduce its supply costs, you can reduce the number of invoices they have to pay by being the central clearinghouse. Along the way, you can help your customer leverage spend, consolidate suppliers and run their company more efficiently.

You can become the one business your customers can’t live without.

Tom

I’ve had the chance over the last couple months to moderate two different sessions of Four51 Sales Training here at our headquarters in Minnesota. Attending these sessions were participants from all over the country coming from Distributors of varying sizes, strategies and outlooks.

I thought I would pass along some anecdotal feedback of mine from these sessions that might create conversation in your shops even if you couldn’t attend yourself. Two areas struck me the most: Branding and Marketing…that is, the way Distributors look at branding and marketing their own firms and how they position the Four51 solution within that. In this post, I will focus on the branding issue, and in the next post I will concentrate on what I heard about marketing.

Branding

All participants to-date work for firms who continue to brand the Four51 technology as their own…in other words, they are packaging the solution as a seemingly proprietary system that only that Distributor can offer to the customer. They wrap their own company name around the solution and offer it as their own. As many of you know (and if you don’t, I’ll fill you in here), Four51 does not require that your branding include any mention of Four51. We only show off our logo in the bottom of each screen with the “Powered by Four51″ image. A proprietary system would indicate that the user, in this case the Distributor, actually owns the technology and for many reasons these Distributors continue to promote the fact that the solution is theirs alone. Again, this is perfectly legal and allowed, I just think that these firms who continue to brand a technology that serves over 1 million registered end-users (and is growing at the rate of 1,600 new end-users each DAY!) as their own is missing the boat when it comes to showing their customers just how powerful and widespread this system is.

To put this into perspective, imagine 10-15 years ago when your firm adopted email as a new application (presumably the majority of you first decided to use Microsoft Outlook like so many millions of others). Imagine that, upon implementing email, you went to your customers and told them that this new application and capability of yours was based on your own technology…that it was your solution. In this scenario, you felt it was critically important to make your customers think that this technology gave you a strategic advantage in the marketplace and therefore, you needed to capitilize on it (all the while hoping your competitors would not adopt the same technology).

Let’s imagine you did all this. Ultimately though, as adoption of email grew, you could no longer sustain this promise in the market and you had to change your branding to reflect the fact that instead of “owning” the technology, you were simply using The Standard (in this case, Outlook). Your usage of Outlook became your competitive advantage, not owning it. You were the best at using it, not at creating and distributing it.

Well, I believe the same dynamic is at work today, and that many of you would benefit greatly by promoting the fact that you use the #1 system in the market, the only system with over 1 million registered users, the only system that is PCI Compliant to Visa’s standards and the only system that is Web-based only and can scale to the needs of your customers. Your branding as a Distributor with a proprietary system will not stand up to the branding of a Distributor who is a Certified Four51 expert and has the capability to solve the business and technology requirements of the largest customers in the world.

This is, of course, only my opinion, but it stands on the shoulders of how businesses have looked at and adopted mass-use business technology for the last 30 years. Four51 is in the business of helping you connect more effectively to your customers, and to connect to more and more and more of them. These ideas are designed to provoke some new ideas in your shops, and to help you get ahead of the curve in order to position your businesses more effectively than your competitors (even your competitors who use Four51 as well!).

In my next post, I will focus on marketing. If you have any thoughts or feedback, please let me know!

Thanks.

Mark Johnson, CEO

Many of you have already received communication regarding our pending upgrade to MPower 6. We are very close to finalizing the upgrade, and once completed I’ll begin a long series of posts regarding Document Actions. The posts will revolve around the usage of the library we have built (37 different actions) for your pleasure. As we look forward to those exciting developments, let’s cover one more Spec Form API method named Masked Input.

Control over user input is such an important facet of most variable products, especially products revolving around Corporate Identity. How many times have you had to create 3 or 4 variables for a simple phone number just so you can control the delimiting character? Not to mention date input. It’s a hassle and simply creates additional development time. The solution to these issues is masked input. Let’s review what it is and how it works in spec forms.

First, masked input is nothing more than a convention that forces users to enter information in a specific pattern. You define a pattern, the pattern is presented to the user for input and then their input is controlled by that pattern. Let’s take a look at an Advanced Script example for controlling a phone number.

That’s all there is to it. That pattern forces a user to enter only numbers, and when they reach a delimiter the “.” will already be there and will not be editable. The cursor will skip over the “.” so the user can simply continue typing. When the phone variable (textbox) has focus “___.___.____” will be displayed.

Here is a snippet of all the examples on the demo product.

The syntax for the Spec Form API follows this convention: spec[variable].mask(pattern, placeholder). The placeholder is the character that displays in the space designated for input. In the phone example, I specify an “*” as the placeholder. The user is then presented with “***.***.**** x****” for input. The default placeholder is the underscore “_”, and this parameter is optional.

As for the patterns themselves, there are predefined placeholders.

• a - represents an alpha character (A-Z, a-z)
• 9 - represents a numeric character (0-9)
• * - represents an alphanumeric character (A-Z,a-z,0-9)

Any other character is treated as a static character in the pattern. The phone example shows an extension aspect. The “x” in the pattern is static and therefore not editable.

Lastly, all input including the placeholder characters are submitted for rendering So the “$” in the Cost mask is part of the saved variable; no need to specify a prefix or hard code the character in your template file. Nice and tidy submission.

As always, you can go to my demo site and find the “Masking Input Demo” product to see this example in action.

As I begrudgingly spent $4.12/gallon filling up my tank the other day, I thought to myself, “There must be a better way.” Minneapolis, unlike other metropolitan cities, does not have the extensive public transportation infrastructure to make taking the bus or train an option. Not owning a bike, and finding it difficult to rollerblade to work, I began contemplating the idea of carpooling.

There has been a buzz around our office lately of co-workers exploring the possibility of biking or carpooling to work in an effort to reduce their carbon footprint, as well as fattening their wallets. I began to wonder how this mentality could be further encouraged by the head honchos of Four51. Has anyone explored a corporate policy of carpooling and rewarding for that behavior? Could anyone recommend some best practices to follow or advice for incentivizing employees to be more environmentally conscious?

~Maren