Customer benefits, now and forever
By Dick Gorelick
To elicit groans from attendees at a seminar or a sales meeting, simply announce that there will be a discussion of the differences between features and...
Industry leadership redefined
By Dick Gorelick
All credibility disappears when I read or hear the term industry leader. The term is defensible only in the case of a handful of individuals and if I...
Healthcare and print
By Dick Gorelick
For the past 30 years or so, I've used a couple of analogies to explain the uniqueness of buying and selling print. One of them involves healthcare and...
A step beyond customer service
By Dick Gorelick
The status of customer service representatives has improved in recent years, especially in the eyes of customers. However, CSRs or the equivalent title...
Learning from printers
By Dick Gorelick
It seems to me that the print community has a giant inferiority complex. There's a belief that the industry is so large, fragmented and segmented that...
Sales manager vs. sales controller
By Dick Gorelick
A big-time issue that has received little or no recognition during the past several years is the role, perhaps even the legitimacy, of the position of...
Differentiated, the same as everyone else
By Dick Gorelick
Competitive differentiation is a subject that eventually determines life or death of every company of every size in every industry, but which too few...
Dealing with tough times
By Dick Gorelick
As this column is written, we're not quite a year into the recession. Some companies with which I'm intimately familiar are doing very well, some are...
Every CEO is a sales rep
By Dick Gorelick
Like it or not, the current state of the economy and changes in buyer-seller relationships during the past several years have, more than ever, put every CEO in the role of sales representative. ...
The elusive concept of profit
By Dick Gorelick
When I begin a consulting assignment, I review every aspect of a client's operating and financial performance to educate myself about the company's history,...
Printers must ask tough questions
By Dick Gorelick
Granted, the current recession came upon us suddenly. And no two graphic arts companies have the same challenges, objectives, culture or account portfolio....
Management: A painful sales learning experience
By Dick Gorelick
An increasing percentage of those who buy, specify and use print view a supplier's performance as a team effort. ...
Management: Economic alchemy
By Dick Gorelick
We disdain the medieval concepts of alchemy and the search for the Holy Grail. However, an argument can be made that we've not grown more sophisticated...
Research results: what print buyers want
By Dick Gorelick
Customer perceptions precede customer behavior. Surveys, intelligently constructed and conducted, can be an early warning system of both positive and...
Details result in relevance
By Dick Gorelick
Interpreting the results of customer surveys is best left to those who are intimately familiar with the graphic arts industry and who believe comments...
Blocking & tackling (again)
By Dick Gorelick
In football, all the Xs and Os, all the 300-page playbooks and the exotic formations can be interesting, even dazzling. In politics, a candidate's credentials...
Let's get real
By Dick Gorelick
I try to work hard at practicing what I preach. I'm not a favorite personality among other industry consultants or many trade associations because of...
Steps to greatness
By Dick Gorelick
I've been privileged to serve on many boards of directors. Board meetings can be dull and perfunctory. Service on one board, a graphic arts company, was...
Sales challenges & considerations
By Dick Gorelick
As I noted in my June 2008 column, Challenge or crisis? placement company Manpower recently dubbed sales representative the position considered the most...
Information, not inspiration
By Dick Gorelick
There are some things in life I will never understand. One is the willingness even the propensity to devise a business plan, train employees and make...
Challenge or crisis?
By Dick Gorelick
Staffing company Manpower, Inc., conducts an annual study of the most difficult jobs to fill. Not surprisingly, sales representative topped the list in...
Looking beyond technology
By Dick Gorelick
To mark the anniversary of this magazine, Katherine O'Brien asked AP readers to discuss changes in the industry during the past l25 years. Despite the...
Customers, in-plants & other competitors
By Dick Gorelick
Competition isn't necessarily confined to other commercial printers. This is a complicated subject. It's impossible to do justice to this scenario in...
Some things indeed have changed
By Dick Gorelick
Despite many quantitative changes in the graphic arts industry, many basics of the business have remained the same since the days of Gutenberg. Economic...
Technology changes; information endures
By Dick Gorelick
We're in the 14th year since the introduction of variable-data color output devices, and the hype continues. Selling the output of this equipment requires...
