The Road to Sales Success: Sell More Software by Leveraging Production Print Trends

The world of production print is in a constant state of flux, with new technologies, solutions, and market dynamics shaping how commercial printers and in-plants operate. For resellers of Rochester Software Associates (RSA) software, recognizing these trends is crucial to effectively serving your customers and boosting software sales.

With that in mind, let’s examine a few key trends we’ve been seeing lately in the production print space that are impacting commercial printers and in-plants — and see what those trends might mean to you.

Inkjet Printing

One of the most significant trends revolutionizing the production print space is the rapid advancement of inkjet technology. As inkjet printers become more affordable and versatile, commercial printers and in-plants have new technology for creating high-quality, cost-effective printed materials for their clients.

What does this mean for you?

Because RSA software is vendor agnostic, you have solutions that work with whatever new technology your clients or prospects add to their fleets while still working with whatever investments they already have using the same workflows.

Variable Data Printing and Personalization

Although not exactly a new trend, variable data printing and personalization continue to allow your clients to create personalized marketing materials, packaging, and promotional items for their customers. This trend accelerated during the pandemic and is still going strong.

What does this mean for you?

This gives you another reason to highlight RSA’s ImpactVDP and demonstrate how it can help your clients create tailored content and drive engagement. ImpactVDP easy to use interface allows a client to offer higher margin VDP content without the need of programmers or graphic artist.

Printing in a Fifth Color

This trend refers to adding an extra ink color in the traditional CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) color model used in printing. This additional color can be a specific Pantone color or a unique spot color, offering commercial printers the ability to produce a wider range of vibrant and accurate colors, metallic effects, and specialty finishes. This capability appeals to businesses looking to create eye-catching marketing materials, packaging, labels, and more.

Numerous hardware vendors have introduced machines with fifth-color capabilities, including Canon, HP, Konica Minolta, Ricoh, and Xerox to name a few.

What does this mean for you?

This is another opportunity to showcase how RSA software is hardware agnostic and seamlessly integrates with printers and digital presses that support the fifth color. Here’s where you can highlight RSA PrePress and Preflighting tools to easily and efficiently manage complex color workflows. This is also an opportunity to emphasize the software’s ability to handle variable data printing and personalization, which can be particularly impactful when combined with the fifth color for targeted marketing campaigns.

Sustainability and Green Printing

This is another ongoing trend that is showing up in more organizations’ RFPs, driving vendors and suppliers to prioritize eco-friendly printing practices and materials to meet their clients’ needs.

What does this mean for you?

This represents another opportunity to highlight RSA’s commitment to sustainability by promoting software features that optimize print production and reduce waste. This can be by doing simple things such as defaulting output to two sided or by requiring approvals for larger runs. Clients can do more complex workflows to group output together and suppress any duplicate content allowing for less items be sent in single delivery.

Automation and Workflow Efficiency

What organization isn’t looking to automate processes, not only to be more efficient but also to do more with less?

What does this mean for you?

The features available in virtually every RSA software solution enhance automation and drive workflow efficiency, which places RSA at the forefront of these trends. Indeed, RSA software plays a crucial role in streamlining workflows, reducing errors, and improving overall productivity. Yes, you know this already — but it’s always helpful to remind your customers! RSA’s ReadyPrint Automatica can be added to any clients workflow to automate repeated steps and ensure it prints correctly the first time.

Digital Transformation

Some commercial printers and in-plants are increasingly integrating digital technologies and data-driven insights into their operations in order to enhance their overall operations and better serve their customers.

What does this mean for you?

Here’s another opportunity to position RSA’s software as a valuable tool for digital transformation, especially because a key benefit is enhancing your customer’s workflow and overall print operations.

E-commerce Integration

As people become more dependent on online shopping in their personal lives, e-commerce integration is spilling over into their work lives as well. As a result, more print shops are looking to streamline the ordering process by adopting Web to print solutions.

What does this mean for you?

As interest in e-commerce solutions gravitates towards the commercial print world, there is an increased demand for Web to Print solutions. Don’t hesitate to promote RSA’s WebCRD as the ultimate Web to Print solution that can bolster your client’s e-commerce capabilities. The new release updates the shopping experience to that comparable to that of retail websites like Amazon.

Conclusion

As a reseller of RSA production print software, it’s essential to understand the ever-evolving trends in the production print space. Awareness of these trends will make you an even more valuable client partner — and perhaps allow you to sell more software too.