Adding Services Grows Sales?

In this episode of How To Sell More, host Mark Drager chats with Josh Golden, Chief Marketing Officer at Quad. Josh shares how he’s helped turn a traditional company into a modern marketing powerhouse—without making things overly complicated. With his deep background in marketing, branding, and media, he talks about the importance of staying focused, managing complexity, and building strong client relationships, especially during times of transformation and growth.

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"Don't make it hard for someone to buy what you have. Focus on solving the marketer's problem." — Josh Golden

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Listen to The Episode!

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Top 3 Reasons to Listen

Strategic Growth Insights: Learn how to expand your business offerings strategically without overcomplicating your operations.

‍Customer-Centric Marketing: Discover the importance of an outside-in approach that prioritizes solving customer problems.

‍Effective Sales Strategies: Gain practical advice on leveraging relationships and simplifying your message to sell more effectively.

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Follow Josh Golden on Social

Website: https://www.quad.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuajgolden/

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More About Today's Guest, Josh Golden

Chief Marketing Officer at Quad, Board Member, and Host of Eureka!

As the Chief Marketing Officer at Quad, Josh is leading this 50-year-old company's transformation from a traditional commercial printing business into a comprehensive marketing experience company. With over two decades of experience in marketing, branding, and media, Josh has been instrumental in driving Quad's evolution, focusing on innovation, client needs, and frictionless marketing.

Prior to joining Quad, Josh served as the President & Publisher at Ad Age, where he is credited with rebranding Ad Age, driving the publication’s digital transformation, creating key new lines of business, and developing some of the company’s most prestigious and profitable offerings.

Before Ad Age, his career included roles such as VP Global Digital Marketing at Xerox, where he oversaw global digital marketing strategies and enhanced the company's digital presence. Josh also spent 15 years on the agency side at Grey New York and Y&R New York, honing his skills in advertising and client relations.

Early in his career, Josh's background was in the film and television space. He worked on the prosecution teams for high-profile cases like People v. O.J. Simpson and People v. Menendez, where he was responsible for the concept development and production of hundreds of video and photo assets used in the courtroom.

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Key Topics Discussed

• Transforming Traditional Businesses: Josh explains how Quad evolved from a commercial printing company into a comprehensive marketing solutions provider while staying true to its core strengths.

• Managing Complexity: The significance of expanding services strategically without introducing unnecessary complexity that could dilute the company's focus.

• Client-Centric Approach: Emphasizing the importance of understanding and solving client problems rather than trying to be everything to everyone.

• Internal vs. External Structure: How Quad maintains different internal business units while presenting a simplified, unified solution to clients.

• Building Strong Relationships: Josh highlights the power of relationships in business growth and how maintaining ongoing communication opens doors for future opportunities.

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Key Takeaways

• Focus on Core Competencies - Stick to what your company does exceptionally well and resist the temptation to venture too far from it.

• Simplify Your Offerings - Make it easy for customers to understand and purchase your services by presenting them in a way that addresses their needs directly.

• Build Strong Relationships- Maintain ongoing communication with clients and industry contacts to foster trust and open doors for future sales opportunities.

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A Transcription of The Talk

Mark Drager: Josh, you are of course, super, super well known within the publishing industry and the advertising industry because you were president and publisher of Ad Age. And for those who aren't familiar, that is kind of the giant in the advertising and marketing agency world, a creative leader. I mean, everyone wants to be in Ad Age, everyone wants to be a part of what you're doing. You are shining the light on some of the coolest campaigns, with the coolest brands, with the greatest agencies. I almost feel a little insecure and lucky to even be talking to you today.

Josh Golden : Mark, go on. It was a... Listen, the truth is, it was a fabulous job. I loved what I did with Ad Age. When I came in, I remember it was Advertising Age at the time. And I said to Rance Crain, I folded a piece of paper where the meeting was like my third meeting with them. And I slid it across the table to him. And he's like, "Is this money?" And I'm like, "Rance, please." And he opened it, and it said Ad Age. I said, "If you can handle that idea, Rance, then you can handle me." And he's like, "What do you mean?" I said, "Listen, Advertising Age is about a 1987 beer commercial that everyone loved. And that was the Advertising Age. Ad Age could be about data, or it could be about connections, or it could be about the evolution of what was at that time, sort of the beginnings of social media and the conversations that were happening with that, or expertise and collaboration." All those things weren't done. And when I joined Advertising Age, and then we rebranded it, we really did evolve it. It became an excellent tool and a mechanism to get the story of a marketer's success out there—the business of brands, if you will.

Mark Drager: Well, you have to understand from my background, I wanted to go into engineering when I was young, but instead, I went to film school.

Josh Golden: Me too! I went to film school too. There you go.

Mark Drager: So I went to film school, I worked in television, I worked at an internet marketing franchise at their head office. And I really found myself more in production. Production pulled to communications, pulled to more marketing, and pulled to advertising eventually. But I come from a pretty pragmatic production-focused world. And I am not, I've come to realize, an advertising person. But I'm really curious because that was your past. But today, you're at Quad, and Quad is a 50-plus-year-old company that has its roots in publication as well, but in manufacturing and in print. And I think this is most relevant to a lot of our listeners because we may be sitting on organizations that are 10, 20, 30 years old, that come from maybe a more industrial or blue-collar approach. And we now need to face a brand new market. We need to face customers who are more interested in data, more interested in expanding our services, or they love us for one thing, and now they're saying, "Please help me with all these other things."

It's so tempting, as a business owner, to say, "I'm really good at this one area, sure, I can help you with the second area." The second becomes the third, and the third becomes the fourth. And suddenly, before you know it, your business is now really complex. You are scattered all over the place, and you're not quite sure what's working and what's not. So a few questions here. One, how have you been able to grow Quad? How are you doing this in a way where you're not introducing too much complexity in the business? And how are you sharing this story with your prospects and customers, knowing that now you do a lot of different things for a lot of different people?

Josh Golden: It's such a great provocation because the reason I joined Quad was, I kind of loved the vibe. You know, like, I met with the CEO and the son of the founder, Joel Quadracci. He is such a gem of a person. And he took me for dinner, and we're chatting. And I was like, "I kind of just like you as a person." So I think that's the thing that I tend to sort of strive for: I want to work somewhere where I really feel like I enjoy who I'm working with. And you know, there were a lot of different opportunities at my fingertips. Ironically, I wanted to take the one where I could have the biggest impact, and Quad was at this place.

And so there was this great phrase I believe in, it's like, "The best way to be a terrific king is to come after a really shitty king." If you can come in and make the world a better place, then you can create momentum and excitement. So my goal coming in was first and foremost to really listen and not stretch so far from what it had been historically that it would break what inherently made Quad. And it was Quad Graphics beforehand, and we rebranded to Quad because they didn't just do the printing piece, they wanted to do other things.

So it started off 52 years ago, well, 53 actually now, making magazines primarily. Then it moved into catalogs, then it moved into direct mail. And every time a client would ask us, "Can you do this?" we would add that on, and it becomes packaging, and then it becomes in-store, becomes all these different divisions. And you're slowly starting to realize what you've created, or what they created over time. And when I joined, they had added a media function called Rise, and a wonderful creative function called BlueSoHo. And it allowed for the marketer to come to Quad and say, "I have this singular problem. Say it's direct mail, but can you do that for me?" Sure. "Do you need someone to design what the direct mail looks like to help you make the offer? Do you need a testing solution? Do you need the data for whom you're going to mail this?" So Quad has created this wonderful, what I call a modern holding company, where you just come in the door. We have a lot of possible entries and a lot of possible facets for you to investigate. But we want to curate the best solution for you.

Now, your second question, which I think is really, really apt, is it's so easy to add on. Well, we could go be a blimp company too because there's sometimes a need for blimps. "Can you make a blimp for us?" We probably could, to be honest with you. But that's not the point. The piece that stays core is always focusing on the marketer's challenge. What is the marketer primarily focused on solving? So if we focus on that area, and we're endlessly looking to evolve and change and develop the best solutions that the marketer is looking for, interestingly enough, it's not just the creative big idea things that brands are looking for.

To be honest, Quad is excellent at its scale without sacrifice. I walked through the in-store division, and they gave me this tour. I was walking around, and they're showing, really. All the things for this very large grocery store. And they're printing off blueberries, strawberries, bananas. This is for store number one. And the second one, for store number two, was apples, blueberries, and then orange juice. And I was like, "Oh, I'm so sorry. You're changing the order for every single store?" And they're like, "Yes, the change is dependent upon..." because they wanted... Quad believes in efficiency when you arrive. When those in-store printed materials arrive at the store, when the person is putting it up, they put it up in order.

So we understand that complexity, absorb it inside of Quad, and then deliver excellence at 2,300 stores. I was blown away by like, "You're mailing, you're making all these things exactly in the order for the store that will never even see." But that is the level of complexity. So to think about how you can market or use that level of excellence, it's the exact right solution that we need to create, but we don't want to go too far. So the first part was the history, and the second part was really, you don't want to stretch it so far that it goes outside the bounds of what you really should be doing to help evolve the brand.

Mark Drager: So you're already in a fairly complex business that is capable of handling a lot of assets, a lot of data, a lot of locations, pretty customized. But if we remove that complexity, and we just think of the business units, sure, in my experience, the more you try to do for one single client, you can't have a zone of genius in all areas. And so I love the idea of being able to be the single source for all of your clients' needs, right? But truthfully, you guys aren't going to be good at everything.

Josh Golden: No, I would hope that is not what the takeaway is. So my history is in film, as we both discussed. And then I went to a lot of different brands—NBC Universal, AT&T, Xerox, Ad Age, and now Quad. And every time, the inclination is there to go beyond what you should. The real expectation, the real hope, is that you're delivering. I remember, in the agency roles I was in, they were like, "What are you great at?" I'm like, I was the new business guy. So I'm like, "Everything." The worst answer ever. There was a story-focused, content agency that said, "We're really great at the storytelling piece of this, we can help you nail that strategy."

When you are honest with yourself about what you can actually sell well, and you've got a great answer, it's the easiest thing ever to sell that because everyone is going to say, "We want that special thing." We just, for example, acquired a company that allowed us to basically stand up an entire retail media network option, which is basically being able to monetize the traffic of people coming through either your website or your store. And having a record of in-store connectors, basically as screens. Because of course, we've done the packaging for the store, we've done the in-store treatment for the store, we do the retail circular for the store. And now we can do these large digital displays. And back to your sort of complexity question, it changes every six to eight seconds what the message is, depending upon who's walking by. If there's no one in there, then there isn't anything served. So we have all these things that we can understand now because we've added on this level of technology that allows for a marketer to use the tools at their fingertips to get the best response possible.

And that, I think, is what I will endlessly sort of pivot towards, like, how is it going to solve the problem of the marketer? An outside-in approach. Yeah, we have these great printing presses that can print at 39 miles an hour, and they're amazing. But that's not a value to the marketer. What is the problem that you can solve for your customers coming into the store so you can quickly understand what it is that they need and want? And that's what I believe Quad is excellent at doing optimally.

Mark Drager: And so if you had to provide advice for a listener who is considering growing through acquisition, growing by starting new departments or new services, or really, I love this term you mentioned—the "can you do?"—and back in our agency journey up until 2016, we were a very video-centric, focused agency. If it was not video primarily first, we would not work with you. And then I fell into the trap of thinking, "I want to be everything for all of my clients." And we went far more full-service digital. We went for performance-based media placement. I wanted to do everything for my clients. I completely underestimated the complexity that I was adding to my business and the level of expertise I required.

And so it is, once again, super tempting because we had clients coming to us saying, "Well, Mark, we love you for this, can you just help us with this?" And I was like, "Oh, yeah." I remember having one entrepreneur client who basically was begging us to build this fairly complex custom application for them. And I kept saying, "This is not our zone of genius." "No, it's gonna be great for you, Mark and it's a new service you can offer," and he's trying to pitch me on building this for him. And we did, and it didn't go that well.

Josh Golden: Well, you tried. I think that we tried. I just think it's really important to know what you do amazingly and to have that knowledge then be shared and celebrated. I mean, we're growing quite well now in the world of this mid-market retailer, meaning we have so many different solutions that a marketer can use—like messaging out, internal packaging, in-store, the in-store connect. All those different things allow us to have a nice little ecosystem of things we can do here.

And it doesn't, not too many of the things stretch beyond like, "Hey, can you invent a new sneaker for us?" I'm like, "Actually, we shouldn't do the sneaker thing for you. But we can come up with the messaging that we can do around the sneaker, but not developing sneakers." That would be one step or maybe two steps beyond. I think that for your listeners, I endlessly try to think about this metaphor that I was using when I first started with Quad. I was like, "I'm gonna get into a speedboat, I'm gonna go as fast as I can out in this direction. I have a rope tied to the battleship, and I'm at a point where I believe the direction will be." And then I got to what I thought was an interesting spot. I turned around, and I was like, "Where's the boat?" I lost the ship, they're gone in the light, they're over the horizon.

So I had to switch boats. I switched to a tugboat. I was like, "We're gonna stay real close to the battleship. And we're just going to nudge the front end of it so we can grow it together into a new area." I think that the brands and the businesses that are trying to grow stretch too far, it's very, very easy to lose sight of who you are as a company at your core. And you can see it's happening a little bit with the large social media companies. They're trying to experiment with other things. Like, "It's not really your thing, you shouldn't really do this." And you can see, like, you don't wish happy birthday to people on LinkedIn, you just don't. I don't know why. You just don't do it. Because it's not part of that platform's sort of ethos. You congratulate people for their new jobs on LinkedIn, but not birthdays. So it's interesting to know who you are at your core. And Quad is extremely exceptional at knowing who we are. We are a Midwestern company. I'm in New York, like, they have an office in New York, for sure. But it's like they have a core Midwestern heritage. They know who they are. They know what they believe in. Just like Google knows that they're engineers at their core, right? Quad is a maker at our core. We make things. We make things that are printed, we make things that are digital, we make ideas, we make products. But they're all things that are physical and tangible. And that is what we are excellent at.

So two years ago, maybe we should make a sneaker if I'm using that metaphor. But the point is that you don't want to go outside of your maker buckets. You're stretching your brand too far. This is what I believe is something that really, you should ask, "Any 'can you do?' should be questioned." Like, does this break my promise that I won't go beyond who we are? Who is the promise that we're making to the industry and what do we stand for?

Mark Drager: And as you grow, then your portfolio of skill sets, services, do you look at them and identify, this is more of a hub and spoke model where this core service is at the centre with these bolt-on services around? We know that this primary central service will be what we're known for and what we will go to market for, and we will draw people in and then introduce the secondary services. Do you approach it more like, if you think of something more flat, where we're now going to go to market with six different core services with six different messages with six different opportunities?

Or is this some kind of more of, let's call it a pyramid? There are foundational tools that you can then build an ascension model and then send clients, when they meet certain criteria, up to that model.

Josh Golden: I think the answer is a little more, "It depends." But the best way that we've evolved is, one when I came in, we figured out what the story was of what Quad does well. And that was this sort of framing of solving the problems of the marketer, where they're endlessly trying to solve the problem for their customer. They're trying to deliver the best CX they can to their consumer. The question I eventually brought up is, "Who's helping the marketer?" So we developed this concept of a marketing experience company, an MX company, like, who's helping the marketer solve their problem?

But many clients will come in one door, and they'll be like, "Oh, I need you to do my media for us. Done. No problem with the media." Then the question is, once you get in the door, and you've landed that client, and they're already comfortable that you can solve their problem, then you slowly add on, "Have you considered these other three things that you might want to help grow your business?" Because we're now in there. I never would propose to always come in the door with one hammer to sort of knock everything over. It's gonna look bad. So I like to listen to the clients first, provide the best solution that we think is logical, and then expand from there. Land and expand, as they say.

Mark Drager: And so when you look at all of these different solutions, there are the five different solutions, but the three main kinds of doors you want people to walk through. Do you run these on different P&Ls? Do you measure your cost of acquisition or your client retention? Do you operate each of these business lines knowing some of them are better profit centres, while others might be more of loss leaders? How do you operate this?

Josh Golden: Right, so Quad operates very much with the actual original siloed businesses. That's how they know whether, you know, like, there's the DM business. And there's the manufacturing, there's the magazine business, there's the agency businesses—all of them operate separately. So that's how we talk inside the company. That's how we talk to each other about our business divisions.

But going outside the walls of Quad, I've been passionate about an outside-in approach. Don't make it hard for someone to buy what you have. So I try to make certain that we're endlessly focused on solving the marketer's problem. What are the top five marketing problems that are out there? It's data, it's media, it's complexity in channel offering. It's an offline and online challenge. All these things we have solutions for. You just have to tell the market, you have to have the salesperson listening well enough, like what is the problem they're hearing? And then deliver like, "Well, turns out we have a thing we made already over here. That's exactly that." And that is why I believe simplicity is like that, it comes back to my Apple analogy. Do you know how many products Apple has?

Mark Drager: How many products like every time excuse are families collectives?

Josh Golden: Physical, I'll go with the products, they call them products. So I won't include different levels of shades of stuff.

Mark Drager: Yes. I don't know. 25?

Josh Golden: Yeah, eight. They have eight. Quad has 300 or so. So the point is, you have to get really good at saying no, that is something we shouldn't do. We shouldn't do that. The cool part about what we're working on with Quad is sort of trimming the bonsai tree, having it be exactly what the marketer needs, so that we're not expanding on what we have, but really showing a solid footprint in that space.

That's what's exciting to me—to show the marketer we can solve their problem, the highest, most important problems, the highest sort of the death of the cookie, you don't know who your customer is. We have household data access—we sell, and we touch 280 million houses weekly. We know what these people read. They read Skier magazine and Woodworking Today. We know they're passionate about those two things. You shouldn't email them anything about snowboarding because they're not going to be interested in that. Skiing is what they're interested in. But no one else has this kind of data because no one else sends mail to the household as much as we do.

So it gives us an interesting little leg up in this now with the death of the cookie. We are the company that you go to like, "Hey, do you know anybody who loves cats?" "Yes, we have the whole list of cat lovers. We know who they are. We know what zip code they live in, and exactly how to communicate with them because we know their address."

Mark Drager: I just want to do a real quick little deconstruct of what I'm hearing you say because I think that this is really important. I don't want us, in our kind of fast-talking approach in this conversation, to skip over a few really key lessons here, which is, one, when you came in, you did not move away from the heritage of the organization. You understood and took a real deep look at what was the glue. What were the core value drivers? What were the things that made you different and who were you focusing on? The marketer. The marketer has problems, the marketer is your customer. How can we solve the marketer's problems?

But what was interesting is when I asked about the five different areas that you go to market and whether they were on a different P&L or how you look at the cost of acquisition for your outbound sales or inbound sales, or what have you, you mentioned, well, internally, we actually look at the business units in a very different way than externally. And this is one of the largest breakthroughs I believe more old school, let's call it old school businesses, need to embrace, which is the way that we look internally at our business based on the stage of production, based on the type of work we do, based on the internal department who might specialize in certain things—that in no way, the operational way you look at your business, means nothing to your prospects and your customers. They don't care about your internal processes. They don't care about the different departments you're touching.

I mean, the greatest—I'm giving something away here—but my biggest lever I can throw when helping our entrepreneurial clients through their brand strategy process is actually just taking all of that internal stuff and saying, how do we make a simplified external version of this? How do we show up to the market the way that people think about us, not the way we internally look at our business? Did you have to work internally to win people over to this external way of thinking?

Josh Golden: I will tell you, thank you for—I actually don't know that I've ever heard someone fully articulate that differentiation. I just knew that I couldn't break what was 53 years of status quo. It's so hard to change that. What I am able to influence was, how are we going to market what we have to make people want to buy it. And the way that we were marketing it was, we're going to sell DM, we're going to sell packaging, we're going to sell in-store. And that was so hard to weave those things together to have one story.

So coming up with what I came in with sort of a philosophy of an outside-in approach, like, how do we get like, you've developed a great printer and you're like, "Guys, buy this printer, it's amazing." You're like, "Why don't you print it? I don't care, buy it anyway." You know, that's not going to work. If you're saying to a customer or a client, "Tell me the problems that you're having." And they communicate with you like, "Actually, I'm working with this thing, and it's kind of annoying." And you're listening, then you can realize, "Well, it's funny if I put this piece and this piece and this piece, which are inherently disconnected internally, and put them together, suddenly the client has a solution."

Now, this is not brain surgery at all. But it took some effort to link—there is an overlap between the external way we're talking. And when it comes inside, then it goes into P&L, and it gets sort of hovered around, but the marketer never needs to see that. As a matter of fact, Joel, my boss, describes it as this great little duck that's swimming very smoothly along the water. But if you look underwater, the legs are paddling really, really fast, right? Quad is excellent at paddling fast. But for the marketer, all they see is this smooth, moving, graceful bird.

And I will tell you that it is a job to connect those two pieces, but it really does help sell the benefit of Quad because it's like, "Hey, they just solved all my problems. I don't know how they did it, but they did it." And the truth is, when it comes inside, there's some massive machine and all these white blood cells like we have to figure this out until they're ripped into pieces. And then suddenly it gets delivered or whatever it's manufactured or made or created or digitally distributed. And it becomes a successful moment for the marketer. They're like, "Wow, Quad solved my problem." Meanwhile, we're all sweating and like, you know, took a minute to breathe through it.

But that's really the cool part about Quad. We do the hard thing a million times, at a level of excellence that never messes up. It's kind of amazing. So I'm proud of what we've done. But I'm also proud that we haven't broken what was already core to the business. But Quad gave us the brand, gave us this ability to tell the story differently so that the marketer can hear it and start to consider us for the different things that they might not have originally considered.

Someone who inherited a printer now has this understanding at scale of doing things that are frankly very difficult, but that could be done by a company like ours pretty easily.

Mark Drager: Oh, my goodness, this has been such a great conversation. I'm, of course, speaking with Josh Golden, who is the Chief Marketing Officer at Quad. I do have one more question for you before we wrap up. And I want to know, tell me your number one tip or strategy to help us sell more.

Josh Golden: So I have a pretty passionate perspective on this. I believe that to sell more, I believe in relationships. Now, of course, I don't know if it's a better answer. But I believe in this because I believe that the relationships that I've had with people historically, and even through my time at Ad Age and other roles, and NBC, were so important. But the relationships that I have, as I switch industries—and I do it purposefully—I bring the intelligence along that I've had from other roles, but I text with people endlessly. I have probably three or four hundred text chains that I keep alive. I know it's a lot. But it's my tool to sell more to people because I have a real ongoing relationship with them.

If I'm calling them out of the blue, like, "Hey, you want to take a meeting?" They're like, "Why would I do this?" But if we've had conversations before, and we've chatted about family, we've chatted about whatever and we're saying, "Happy Mother's Day," whatever it is. It's the keep-alive that keeps a relationship. It's a light relationship sometimes, or it's deep. It can go either way. Sometimes they call me for favors, sometimes I text them for favors. But it's that ability to have a relationship that allows that person to let you in their front door and have a conversation with them. And then you can potentially sell more. It's not always a gimme, but I will tell you that it is a great first step.

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Resources & Go Deeper

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"11 Strategies to Expand Your Service Offerings in 2023" – StrategyDriven

This article outlines practical ways to expand services to grow sales, emphasizing market research, offering customized services, and leveraging technology to set your business apart. It also highlights how partnering with other businesses and continuously innovating can drive significant growth. These strategies align with expanding a business’s service portfolio in a way that avoids unnecessary complexity.

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"4 Forward-Thinking Sales Strategies to Embrace in 2023" – U.S. Chamber of Commerce

This article provides insights into new sales strategies, focusing on customer retention and upselling to increase revenue. It discusses the importance of personalization and technology in sales, which ties into the theme of adding services to meet evolving customer needs while keeping operations streamlined and effective.

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"How to Scale a Service-Based Business" – Jay Allyson

This article discusses how service-based businesses can expand by automating tasks, training staff for new services, and building strong customer relationships. It highlights the importance of maintaining service quality while scaling to increase revenue.

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