What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an agnostic, and a dyslexic?

Someone who stays up all night wondering if there really is a Dog.

—Groucho Marx

This famous joke by Groucho Marx is clever and silly at the same time. Some people may think it crosses the line of tastefulness. 

Nevertheless, the idea behind the joke—that mixing things together produces interesting results—is one that can successfully be applied business-fashion to sign and graphics shops. In fact, doing so could very well produce results that are not only interesting, but could add substantially to the bottom line. 

Let’s start with the notion of cross training your staff. Cross training is training an employee to do a different part of the organization’s work. For example, training your printer operator to work the laminator and/or training your laminator operator to run the printer. 

Cross training is good for managers, because it provides more flexibility in managing the workforce to get the job done. However, done right, cross training is also good for the employees, because it lets them learn new skills, makes them more valuable to the company, and it serves well to avoid worker boredom. 

There are many opportunities for cross training in sign and graphics shops. If you haven’t already done so, look around the shop and imagine how much easier life might be if inpiduals in your staff could cover other kinds of jobs in a pinch. 

Then there’s the idea of cross-merchandising your product line, a tried and true marketing strategy for generating sales of multiple products by linking them together in the minds of prospective buyers. In a retail setting, this can mean setting up displays that include two or more products that are different, but can logically be used together—like dress jackets, ties and handkerchiefs being displayed alongside shirts in a department store. For sign and graphics shops this might mean producing marketing materials that show several of your products that could be used together in a single media campaign, say for a large public event, which might benefit from your banners, temporary way-finding systems and mesh graphics. 

Cross-merchandising is good for businesses for the same reason it is good for clients—it encourages additional sales and shows targeted clients ways to achieve their signage/promotional needs in ways they may not have thought of. 

And lastly, I’ll float the idea of cross-selling your clients. This idea is very similar to the cross-merchandising notion in that the aim is to gain multiple sales from each client. However, rather than simply presenting multiple solutions in your marketing efforts, you actively present multiple product possibilities and/or add-ons in sales presentations and job proposals. This approach works best if the sales representative is intimately aware with how all of your products and services can be used, which are best for particular situations, and which combinations of products will give the client the best bang for their buck while creating multiple sales for your shop. 

What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros? Elephino.

Okay, back to work.