T.J. Tedesco

Despite some ribbing about retiring and death, T.J. Tedesco returned to PRINTING United Expo and shares his thoughts on the industry.

This is where we left off last week on my Pittsburgh Marathon Workout Odyssey. Please remember what I wrote last week: this will not be a profile in excellence.

Readers of this blog might recall in March I announced I was running the Pittsburgh marathon on 5/1/16. Yeah, I finished it, but that’s not the point. There are demand generation parallels in five areas I'd like to mention.

I landed in Copenhagen earlier this morning, transferring en route to drupa. The flight was an hour-ish late making my connection to Düsseldorf rather tight. Waking up in a fog that Americans flying to Europe usually feel, I stumbled off the plane and walked through Danish Passport control to transfer to another terminal. Only then did I do the traveler’s pat. Passport, left front pocket. Check. Cell phone, right front pocket. Check. Biz card case back right pocket. Check. OMG, back left pocket empty.

The awful morphing truth about our beloved print industry is that solving customers' communication needs isn't nearly enough anymore. We need to use our technologies and capabilities to solve our clients’ business needs. This is how today’s printers create non-replaceable relationship value.

Concluding this multi-part blog series, here are my answers to the last three questions asked by a trade pub editor for an article on sales process.

Continuing with the second installment of a three-part blog series, here are answers to more sales planning questions, prepared in response to a trade pub editor’s request.

Practice a modified form of the golden rule. Communicate with others the way they want, not the way you want. At your first meeting, find out how your prospect prefers to be contacted — email, text, phone, online meeting, breakfast meeting, Slack, or some other way — and do it.

What's the quickest way to irrelevance? How about claiming you're still relevant? Isn't this what many of us do in the commercial printing industry? We stand on our soapbox and cite this or that study claiming variations on the theme "print's not dead." When you phrase things negatively, aren't you giving credence to exactly the opposite viewpoint?

My best drupa? drupa 2000, my first one. My worst drupa? drupa 2000 as well. I remember feeling like I was chasing my tail.

I'm trying to get back into shape. Oh, is it tough. Shedding the bad habits of the past is hard work. Bad habits weren’t such a problem a decade ago, but they are today. My clients are getting their demand generation efforts in shape too. There are parallels.

Call it serendipity, but a chance email led to this quasi-follow up to my March 4th blog on rekindling former business relationships. I received a nice 20% offer from a national retailer to reactivate me as a customer. But, there were two problems with this.

Every 12-18 months, I ask my established clients (in business at least a half decade) to set aside a few weeks of sales and marketing energy to examine their former client lists and choose some to target as key prospects. The reasons to do this are straightforward.

Today, we’re going to address what specific content distribution steps are required for a successful inbound marketing program.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve discussed the principles of how inbound marketing works. Hopefully, you understand how crucial an effective content distribution strategy is. Today, we’re going to see how well these principles sync up with what actual marketers want.