Print Management Sales Process Part III - Value Proposition

In part two of this six part series, we left off at the value proposition. The value proposition, or conceptual, is a term used in the Strategy Development Print Management Sales Process (PM) to describe both the presentation and the first meeting. You aren’t selling speeds and feeds here—and it isn’t the 1980s any longer—so it is best not to position your first appointment as the qualifying event. You will qualify the prospect, but you will do it by reviewing a presentation on the benefits of PM.

Before we get into the value proposition, I want to take time to discuss the PM sale. Although some want to make PM, or managed print services (MPS), out to be some revolutionary and unique space, it is not. It is a fairly simple outsourcing arrangement, and one that has been around for a long time. On the facilities management continuum of complexity it would fall in the least complex range. Nevertheless, like all outsourced arrangements there are risks for the customer. In PM the risks are small but they do exist. There is always the option of maintaining your current approach with your imaging and printing fleet. After all, before you educated the prospect on all of the pain they were enduring with their imaging and printing assets, they thought all was fine.

Let’s look at a sale that most of us know and use: the example of buying a new car. You basically have three options: Upgrade, downgrade, or maintain. First something triggers your desire to buy the new car. Maybe the one you have had just hit 150,000 miles or you are experiencing ever increasing mechanical breakdowns—your car, in your opinion, is worn out and you make the decision to replace it. Let’s say you had a great year at work and are flush with cash so you decide to trade in your Honda Accord for a new Acura Legend; you are upgrading. Another option could be that revenue is down and you really don’t want to expend money on a new car, but having come to the decision that the current Honda is worn out, you decide to buy a Hyundai Accent to keep payments low (downgrade). In this example, you can substitute copier or server for the car and you have the same type of options.

What do you do once you have decided to buy that Acura or Hyundai? You go on the Web and identify precisely what the dealer paid for the car and identify any promotions you can leverage. You might even call another dealer or two to make certain you are getting the best price. If you were buying a copier or server you would either use the Web or other dealers to ensure you get the best price possible.
With PM the prospect does not have to make a decision to move forward. You are asking the prospect to change the way they do business—not to simply replace a worn out piece of equipment. In these “new” sales, where you are selling something different than what the prospect is currently buying, the status quo becomes your biggest competitor. And speaking of competition, you also find that the person who educates the prospect on the new approach is usually able to position themselves as a consultant, and if the prospect decides to move forward you will get the sale. When you don’t get the sale it is usually because the prospect decided not to change.

By this point you probably already figured this out: It is critical to present a compelling business case for PM, to be recognized as an expert in the field, and to maintain sales momentum. After that short digression let’s get back to the value proposition.

The best communication application I know is PowerPoint. For your value proposition, strategy review, proposal, and quarterly account reviews Strategy Development recommends you use PowerPoint. Unless you have a large audience of more than eight prospects, it is recommended that you use a printed version of the presentation. It should be printed in color, wire bound, and you should be certain to have enough copies for everybody expected to attend the meeting, plus one extra.

What do you include in your value proposition presentation? To answer that question you need to first determine the pain points a company, and the IT department, experiences with an unmanaged imaging and printing fleet. Once you identify those pain points you need to design a communications approach that accomplishes the dual goal of articulating the issues and getting the prospect to talk about their situation. You need to build a business case for PM. This meeting will either start you down the road to a successful PM contract or it will have you slammed into a wall. It is critical that your presentation and delivery position you as both an expert and a consultative company to the prospect.

The Strategy Development Print Management Value Proposition is 13 slides. If you simply read it to your prospect you could deliver it in 20 minutes. Of course the goal is not to read it to the prospect but rather to use it as an educational and discussion opportunity, so it should take about an hour to deliver. At the same time you are educating the prospect, you are trying to determine if the person or persons you are presenting to agree that they are experiencing pain with their current approach and that they have the authority to either sign a contract or get a contract signed. At Strategy Development we call this an advocate with juice who has the pain.

If you do not find pain and juice than you have two options: reschedule a value proposition with the person you identified as having juice or just leave. If there is no pain then just leave. Everybody will agree to an assessment so there is no magic in conducting one. Any bad—or poorly trained—sales person could have a 100% assessment to appointment ratio. Getting assessments is not the goal; getting contracts is the goal.

Now that you have identified that you have an advocate with juice and pain it is time to conduct the assessment. Two questions always come up regarding assessments. 1) Do I charge for the assessment? 2) Do I get a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) signed? The simple answer is no and no. The assessment provides you the data to build a business case for PM. The key is the “you,” and not the prospect. You aren’t going to provide the prospect with the details of your assessment. You are going to use the information to make recommendations and you will provide data at a very high level. Why would you put anything in front of the prospect that will preclude you from conducting the assessment or infer that you are going to give them all types of detailed information?

For instance, you’ll let them know that they have 116 printers, three different manufacturers, 11 different models, 20 different cartridges, producing 325,000 black and white and 8,000 color prints per month. That information wouldn’t allow anybody to price out a PM agreement. You aren’t going to tell them specific volume by printer and certainly not CPP by model. Keep in perspective that your primary competition is the status quo and that you are building a business case and positioning yourself as a consultant. If you execute well, you’ll get a contract. If not, the prospect will probably maintain their current approach.

There are two things you should have for an assessment—a rapid assessment key (RAK), like PrintAudit, and time. If you need to make a decision on one or the other, throw the key (or software) away. I am not suggesting that a RAK cannot be beneficial; it is. The problem occurs when the salesperson depends solely on the RAK and does not conduct the walk around. The most important aspect of the assessment is walking around and actually experiencing the location of the imaging and printing assets and being able to casually speak to the end-users. I am not referring to in depth interviews—they are not necessary to close a PM sale—I mean simply asking the end-user a question like “tell me about your printer” while you are waiting for the configuration page to print. The good news is that it appears that the software companies have been reading Strategy Development’s articles as they now appear to agree that the walk around is critical to a successful assessment.

Using both the RAK and walk around, you want to identify every imaging and printing device: scanners, fax units, copiers, and printers. You want to get meter reads from all of the devices, even if you will not be managing them. Fax units use cartridges so you should understand their usage so you can include them in your contract; you want to manage them so that you can manage them out of the environment with your quarterly account reviews. Note every brand, model, and if identified, servicing vendor.

The next question that always surfaces with an assessment is the importance of an asset map. A rough map, which could simply be a copy of the prospect’s evacuation diagram with assets noted, is very helpful to your organization for service. When it comes to moving a great many assets it is beneficial to have a more formal map, like Visio or PowerPoint, to show the prospect a before and after view. But it is highly unusual to be moving a lot of assets in a PM approach, so 90% of the time creating a map is simply a waste of time and provides the prospect with too much information. I have a saying I picked up some years ago, “There is margin in mystery.” The more information you give a prospect—or customer—the less mystery and the lower the margin.

In part four of this six part series we will pick up with additional information you should identify with the assessment process and move into the strategy session and pricing the agreement. u

Tom Callinan is the founding principal of Strategy Development, a management consulting firm specializing in business planning, sales effectiveness, advanced sales training, and operational and service improvement (www.strategydevelopment.org). From 1998 – 2005, Callinan was an executive with IKON Office Solutions, most recently vice president and general manager of IKON’s largest business unit with revenue of $1.4 billion. Prior to IKON, Callinan was the founder and CEO of Copifax, Inc, a copier dealership that was recognized with numerous awards including inclusion on the INC 500 list of fastest growing private US companies. Copifax was acquired by IKON in 1997. Callinan graduated with honors from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Tom can be reached at callinan@strategydevelopment.org or 610.527.3317