Paul Nickoloff, owner of Fotorecord, is a passionate entrepreneur whose love for printing is contagious. Early in his 28-year printing career, he successfully scaled from $1MM to $8MM in just three years. Inspired by his innovative entrepreneurial spirit, we laid out a systematic approach to address his current business development goals and his genuine care for his customers. It all started with two simple questions: What is the shortest path to getting customers curious about his online printing solution? And how could this turn into $1MM in revenues over the course of a year? Paul’s customers don’t ask many questions related to printing. They’re not naturally interested in what’s new and how it could work for them. We knew this wasn’t a conversation his clients where already having that we could join. We had to find a more creative angle. First we needed to know who was most likely to use his online store technology. Based on our analysis, we concluded that businesses with multiple offices, more than one person responsible for procurement, which also used multiple print products (like stationery, forms, signage and others), were most likely to benefit. Next, we figured out how many such businesses were out there. From there, we designed an effective sales process and customer engagement plan. The mechanics were simple: get people to see a live demo of the store, give them a store credit they could use to try the store, don’t ask them to sign a contract and set up the store for free. The average company spends over $40,000 a year on printing, so we need only 25 new clients for Paul to achieve his goals. We researched and planned several touch-points designed to surprise people and arouse their curiosity about printing. We found just the right angle to initiate dialogue and build a tiny bit of suspense using a multi-channel approach. We’ll keep you posted on how this worked for Paul.