When the copier and printer industry finds a buzzword, they
don’t let go…for a long time. Remember digital? Remember
connectivity? Remember solutions? Those were all buzzwords at one
time. While solutions continues to maintain its buzzword status,
digital and connectivity are now well past the buzzword stage and
dealers who didn’t pick up on those two buzzwords when they were
in full bloom are probably long gone from the industry.
Now we have a new buzzword. I’m sure you’ve heard it bandied about
to the point where you’ve likely said, ‘Enough already.’ You know
what it is—Managed Print Services, aka MPS.
Everybody’s talking about it, doing something about it, or
touting it as the great white hope of the copier and print
industries. There are consultants and consulting organizations
devoted to MPS as well as conferences and seminars. Add to that
the many columns and articles like this appearing in a trade
publication near you. Try as you might and like it or not, if
you’re in the copier or printer business, you can’t escape MPS.
It’s hard to make a case against it. Consider the latest numbers
from market research companies such as The Photizo Group and
Gartner. Both estimate that for companies 250+ in size, 70 percent
of those will be under some type of MPS engagement within the next
couple of years. If your customers aren’t that large, don’t worry,
you’ve still got plenty of viable customers who are suitable
candidates for a MPS engagement.
“We tell people if they’re producing 15,000 pages a month on their
printers and they have a copier and fax machine in their office,
that’s big enough to do a managed print services engagement,”
contends Doug Johnson, Senior Vice President of Supplies Network,
a wholesaler of IT consumables.
Tom Callinan, Principle of Strategy Development, Inc., a
consulting firm focused on MPS, identifies candidates for MPS
agreements as organizations with 40 or more printers (that figure
includes printers, copiers, MFPs, and fax machines).
Another prime candidate is a customer whose IT department is
falling behind on their core IT projects because they’re spending
too much time dealing with printer-related issues. Another strong
candidate is an organization with multiple departments that isn’t
leveraging their spending across all their output devices and are
dealing with multiple hardware vendors.
“Printing a document is a fairly simple process yet many companies
have multiple vendors,” says Callinan. “They have leases, they
have a copier vendor, a fax vendor, a printer vendor, toner
vendors, and maybe they’re using a VAR to fix their printers. It
could be six different vendors. Yet they don’t buy their
computers, servers or telephone systems from six different vendors
and those areas are a lot more complex and mission critical.”
The Don’ts
Like any new concept, there’s bound to be some confusion and
mistakes made along the way. If you’ve already started to dabble
in MPS, maybe you’ve made a few mistakes yourself. You know the
old Dylan line, “…There’s no success like failure and failure’s no
success at all”? Well, a good way to get better at MPS is to learn
from your mistakes or the mistakes of others. We’ve polled the
experts and have identified a few good ones that are common to the
average office equipment dealer. One of the biggest mistakes
dealers make is talking about cost per page.
“What they’re probably doing is selling a click charge or
cost-per-page program labeled as an MPS program,” says Ed Crowley,
President of The Photizo Group, an organization that is arguably
the de facto standard in MPS consulting. “The reality is MPS is
very proactive. It’s an ongoing engagement. It’s not just a
financial arrangement for getting a per-page cost although it can
be structured on a per-page basis too.”
The challenge from a MPS provider perspective, says Crowley, is
making sure that you’re not offering customers a cost-per-page
program dressed up as MPS but really not anything different.
The other thing is making sure you explain to customers how you
will help them improve their workflow or business processes,
walking customers and prospects through the process.
“It shouldn’t just be, ‘We have some software that will help you
with that,’” says Crowley. “Software is just one piece of the
solution. You should have a process or a game plan and software
may or may not be part of it, but you need to ask about their
requirements and what {they} need.”
Another faux pas is walking in the door and telling the customer
you’re going to rip out their existing fleet and replace those
with new devices. That’s the old box-moving mentality that many
dealers have been weaned on since childhood.
“Don’t go in trying to sell or think you can sell a specific brand
of hardware,” says Greg Walters, MPS Practice Manager for SIGMAnet
and owner of the DeathOfTheCopier blog. “Look for someplace where
you can save the guy money. I run into this competitively all the
time; you get the Canon guy, the Ricoh guy, and they do MPS, but
all they’re trying to do is lower lease payments and swap out
equipment. That’s the wrong intent. That isn’t really MPS and
doesn’t get [the customer] anywhere. Go in acting like you’re not
going to sell anything and show how you can save them money today
by affecting what they do and how they do it. Ultimately you’re
probably going to get some equipment in, but that shouldn’t be
your original intent.”
Similarly, Crowley recommends looking at ways to work with the
customer’s existing devices and transition them over time to an
optimal solution whether it’s one vendor or multiple vendors. And
the operative words here are “multiple vendors.”
“Multivendor support is very important because very few fleets are
a single brand,” says Crowley.
Crowley isn’t alone in that opinion.
“I’d be wary of any vendor that does an assessment and at the end
says you need new departmental multifunctional devices that the
vendor just happens to sell versus selling an outsourcing
agreement,” adds Callinan.
The Do’s
Now that we’ve got some of the key don’ts out of the way,
let’s look at the do’s. As you make your foray into MPS, it’s
important to understand what your customer wants to achieve from
their MPS engagement.
“Is it cost savings, fleet replenishment, or reducing IT support
time so they can work on more mission critical projects?” asks
Johnson. “Those are all important elements that an end-user should
not only think about, but communicate to the reseller proposing an
MPS engagement.”
Johnson recommends that MPS providers be prepared to explain what
they do and how they approach an MPS engagement.
“Provide references and examples or case studies of how you’ve
helped other customers,” he says.
Another issue that’s bound to come up with any MPS engagement is
end-user resistance.
“They’re terrified you’re going to take their printers away so if
you’re talking to them and understanding their requirements, you
can pinpoint those pockets of resistance,” says Crowley.
To ensure the transition goes smoothly and to deal with that
resistance, Crowley recommends that MPS providers offer change
management support that helps end-users understand why you’re
implementing an MPS program and what the benefits are for them and
the company.
“As a CIO once told me, ‘I never knew how passionate end-users
were about their printers until I started taking them away,’”
recalls Crowley. “It’s really about change management. It’s a
different way of operating and customers need help with that.”
There should also be an exception process to identify where the
exceptions are in the company. The reason for that is that one
employee may have a printer on their desk and she may have a need
for it that is a valid business reason. If the MPS provider
doesn’t understand that user’s needs, they may end up taking that
printer away and making her less efficient.
Periodic updates or reviews of your printer fleet are critical
too. Callinan says that for an organization with 30 or 40
printers, this ought to happen twice a year or so. The MPS
provider should also make sure that the client has the correct
device in the correct location.
“Somebody doing 200 prints a month doesn’t need an $800 printer,”
opines Callinan. “That’s overkill. They’d never make up the money
they save on the reduced cost to print over the life of the
printer. If someone doing 5,000 prints a month buys a $200
printer, they probably should have spent $400 more and would
probably make up the difference in the price of the hardware in
under six months.”
Another thing the MPS provider should do is gauge office printing
patterns. It’s not unusual for offices to be reconfigured and
high-volume users find themselves switched to an area that was
once occupied by low-volume users, and now that high print volume
is going to a low-volume device. Identifying these conditions will
ensure that high-volume users continue to output on the most
appropriate device.
The Photizo Group breaks MPS engagements down into three
stages—control, optimize, and enhance.
“A lot of vendors will just talk about cost savings and maybe
environmental improvements, which are all related to Stage 1 and
Stage 2, controlling and optimizing your print environment,”
explains Ed Crowley, President of The Photizo Group. “That’s a
hardware-centric thing, trying to get control of the fleet and the
usage and user requirements, and then optimizing through the right
deployment, and rightsizing the fleet with the right devices and
applications.”
He maintains that those are some of the advantages of MPS, but the
vendor should help the client get to stage three, which is
enhancing the business so they’re into business process
optimization or making the client’s business run better. Some
dealers are good at stage one and two, but don’t know anything
about stage three and never help the client achieve those
benefits.
When looking at opportunities to right-size your customer’s fleet,
conduct end-user assessments that help you understand their needs
so they achieve the right productivity, cost savings,
environmental impact, and IT time savings that they’re looking to
reap from an MPS engagement.
Crowley says it’s extremely important that you understand user
needs throughout your client’s organization.
“Does your assessment process include not just meter reading and
what the usage is, but a physical survey of the site, talking to
end-users and understanding their needs?” he asks.
The big ‘do’ from Walters perspective is to qualify, qualify,
qualify.
“Keep double checking to make sure the guy in front of you is a
true prospect and he’s going to walk with you through the sales
cycle,” he says. “And in each step of the sales cycle you have to
qualify, qualify, and qualify, meaning ‘Is this prospect willing
to do what it takes to work with me?’”
Walters cautions that just because you get an appointment and the
prospect wants to talk MPS, doesn’t mean you’ll get the sale.
“There are all these steps in between that you have to qualify
and check off before you get to the sale,” he explains. “The MPS
guys are really excited once they get an appointment and real
excited once they get an assessment, but only 50 percent of people
who do assessments actually get the deal. You need to make sure
that this guy is the right fit for you and you for him and make
sure that you know it and he knows it.”
Take MPS or Leave It?
MPS makes sense on many, many levels, particularly when an MPS
program will reduce a customer’s output expenses. But make no
mistake, MPS isn’t a way to ramp up your box sales. And after
reading the do’s and don’ts, if that’s all you think it is and
should be, well then, you’re welcome to write the next article
about “How to Fail at MPS.”
Scott Cullen has been covering the office equipment industry
since 1986 and he’s thankful that MPS is giving him something new
to write about.
