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This is Bob Saunders, vice president of sales for Wise.   Do you have clients that send out hundreds of thousands or even millions of documents every month? These products aren’t being printed on sheets like most business forms and labels that distributors sell. They are printed on giant rolls set on an unwinder at the front of a high-speed (often inkjet) press. This way, the press can run millions of documents nonstop.

What are some of the products sold in jumbo rolls? While this isn’t an exhaustive list, here are some of the more common ones:

Financial statements, statement, transactions, invoices, utility bills, checks, preprinted shells for variable overprinting, and even promotional inserts

So, who uses jumbo rolls? Jumbo roll applications aren’t commonly sold by most distributors. However, if you can break into this market, selling jumbo rolls can be a great opportunity and offer long-term profits.

Jumbo rolls are primarily used in the statement processing and direct mail spaces. Typically, they are printed in-house by companies with their own high-speed inkjet presses. In most cases, these companies are buying blank jumbo rolls directly from the mill. This is because, on a web press, they can print at extremely high volumes very cost-effectively, far more cost-effectively than they can on a digital or sheetfed offset press.

So, when the customer is already printing jumbo rolls in-house, how do you break into this market? Generally, it happens when the end customer has a problem they can’t solve on their own. They can’t hit the color, for example, or the logo doesn’t look good. Perhaps they can’t run the desired configurations, such as certain perfs they might need.

While distributors might wonder, how often does this really happen? The answer is, “Often enough!” One of those times was a little over a year ago when one of our distributor customers lost a large jumbo roll job when the customer, which was a large financial institution, brought it entirely in-house. Rather than give up on the account, the distributor worked closely with us to uncover new applications to replace the lost revenue.

Ultimately, the distributor won the jumbo roll job back. Why? Because the financial institution suddenly needed a proxy statement to be printed and in the mail by the end of the month. It sure wasn’t easy! But we turned around three to four truckloads of printed product in less than two weeks! Our ability to help the distributor meet the needs of its customer really built trust between the two. Since then, the distributor has gotten deeper into the account. Ultimately, pushing through that difficult application paid off.

Want to see if there might be a jumbo roll opportunity in YOUR future? Contact your regional sales manager. Go to WBF.com, and under “About us,” click on “Regional Sales Managers” to locate and contact yours.

That’s it for now. Thanks for listening, and have a great day!