![\"McDonald](\"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/McDonald-West-FINAL-3-199x300.jpg\")
West McDonald<\/p><\/div>\n
You might have your skeptical hat on right now.\u00a0Good.\u00a0It\u2019s what has helped you to become successful over the years.\u00a0You were around when toner cartridges were only \u201csold\u201d as a line item.\u00a0Over the years, however, that changed.\u00a0Somebody came to you with the crazy concept of CPP billing and eventually you adopted it.\u00a0Now CPP could represent anywhere from 30% to 90% of how you make money. Don\u2019t forget, however, that you took an educated leap of faith to adopt CPP in the first place.<\/p>\n
Nothing is forever, including CPP billing. It has become what commodity based cartridge sales was 15 years ago: a downward spiral of margin reduction and increased competition. We all know these facts from first hand experience so I\u2019ll leave the facts and statistics alone.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just that CPP is long in the tooth.\u00a0Customers are demanding new ways of being billed for most everything else they consume and \u201cAs\u00a0A Service\u201d models are proliferating. According to the Economist, \u201c80% of companies are seeing a change in how their customers want to access and pay for goods and services and 50% of these same companies are changing their pricing models as a result.\u201d A case in point:\u00a0a couple of weeks ago I met a sales rep from Vestas (the windmill company) at a hotel where we were both attending different conferences. He shared with me that they now charge \u201cby rotation\u201d in many cases.\u00a0So, the giant wind towers are never owned, the energy client simply pays for rotations.\u00a0Imagine.<\/p>\n
If we agree that customers are looking for new ways to be billed for services, how can we adapt?\u00a0SBB (Seat Based Billing) is one unified billing model that has a ton of advantages:<\/p>\n
1.\u00a0Deepen Dealership\/Customer Relationships<\/strong> 2. Make Selling More to Existing Customers Easier<\/strong> An even greater example is Google.\u00a0There was a time when you paid individually for your email, web sharing utilities, and online document storage.\u00a0Google offers all of these services as a single user based bundle.\u00a0Just like the cable companies they are bundling and charging by user to increase wallet-share, stickiness, and customer loyalty.<\/p>\n SBB for MPS can do the same for us in the imaging channel.\u00a0The model allows us to easily layer on additional products and services onto the same bill. CPP doesn\u2019t allow for this as the very model itself is page specific.\u00a0With SBB or user based billing we can offer rules based control software like Print Audit, Document Management software, Managed IT Services, heck, even Telephony and Cloud services. We can add all of these things simply by adding an addendum to the existing MPS contract. Unless your contract is CPP.\u00a0Then you\u2019re out of luck. Now you\u2019ve got an entirely unique sales cycle ahead of you.\u00a0The moral: Start moving to SBB and start layering additional high-margin products and services to the same contract.<\/p>\n 3. Simplify Billing Administration<\/strong> SBB changes both the complexity of billing as well as the amount of time it takes to get paid.\u00a0The customer receives the same unified bill every single month.\u00a0And because it\u2019s a subscription service, the customer pays for the user\u2019s ability to print at the beginning of the month!<\/p>\n 4. Easier for Sales to Understand Commission<\/strong> 5. Early Adoption = Less Competition<\/strong> 6.\u00a0Sell What the People are Buying<\/strong> It\u2019s up to us to work with our customers to see if they have other ways they would prefer to be billed.\u00a0I can assure you many of your customers are doing SBB or another form of user-based subscription service for many of their business function areas today.\u00a0You might be surprised at how interested they would be if you could offer MPS in a more user-centric model.<\/p>\n Offering a unified billing model like SBB could be a very smart option if you are looking to gain more wallet share, increase stickiness, simplify billing, and pay your sales team more effectively.\u00a0If you aren\u2019t certain where to start, you can contact me or other members of the Seat Based Billing Executive Council. This 29 dealer and partner group spent over 12 weeks working on an effective SBB model for managed print. You can also download a primer on SBB for MPS HERE (www.printaudit.com\/sbb).<\/p>\n SBB is here and ready for prime time.\u00a0The only question left to ask is, are YOU ready?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Anybody that knows me well knows that I am a big proponent of SBB (Seat Based Billing) for Managed Print. I\u2019ve talked at various events on the topic over the years and you may have been in one of those sessions. For better or for worse I\u2019m actually now referred to as \u201cthat SBB guy.\u201d\u00a0That\u2019s fine by me because SBB is no longer just an academic discussion. In 2015 we moved from \u201ctalk\u201d to \u201cplanning.\u201d\u00a0This was the year I chaired the SBB Executive Council, a 29-member group of business owners and OEMs who spent 12 weeks building a viable SBB model.\u00a0This exercise in planning must have worked, because 2016 marks the first year where I\u2019ve actually had conversations with dealers, distributors and OEMs who are starting to offer SBB.\u00a0You heard me correctly: SBB for MPS is now starting to become an actual offering. Most are in the beta phase working with a select number of customers to refine and test the model.\u00a0It has begun. You might have your skeptical hat on right now.\u00a0Good.\u00a0It\u2019s what has helped you to become successful over the years.\u00a0You were around when toner cartridges were only \u201csold\u201d as a line item.\u00a0Over the years, however, that changed.\u00a0Somebody came to you with the crazy concept of CPP billing and eventually you adopted it.\u00a0Now CPP could represent anywhere from 30% to 90% of how you make money. Don\u2019t forget, however, that you took an educated leap of faith to adopt CPP in the first place. Nothing is forever, including CPP billing. It has become what commodity based cartridge sales was 15 years ago: a downward spiral of margin reduction and increased competition. We all know these facts from first hand experience so I\u2019ll leave the facts and statistics alone. It\u2019s not just that CPP is long in the tooth.\u00a0Customers are demanding new ways of being billed for most everything else they consume and \u201cAs\u00a0A Service\u201d models are proliferating. According to the Economist, \u201c80% of companies are seeing a change in how their customers want to access and pay for goods and services and 50% of these same companies are changing their pricing models as a result.\u201d A case in point:\u00a0a couple of weeks ago I met a sales rep from Vestas (the windmill company) at a hotel where we were both attending different conferences. He shared with me that they now charge \u201cby rotation\u201d in many cases.\u00a0So, the giant wind towers are never owned, the energy client simply pays for rotations.\u00a0Imagine. If we agree that customers are looking for new ways to be billed for services, how can we adapt?\u00a0SBB (Seat Based Billing) is one unified billing model that has a ton of advantages: 1.\u00a0Deepen Dealership\/Customer Relationships As traditional CPP has become more commonplace as an offering in the last few years it has led to a dramatic increase in competition. Customers are being inundated with alternative bids come contract renewal and the typical response is to offer a lower CPP rate to hold onto the business.\u00a0Customers don\u2019t appreciate the value we\u2019ve brought them because when we deliver exceptional service it makes managed print seem easy.\u00a0We need to deliver even more value and SBB could be exactly what the doctor ordered.\u00a0By being able to layer additional services such as digitization and document management we can deepen the customer’s reliance on our expertise.\u00a0The more things we can do to deepen the levels of service the more likely we are to demand a stronger price come contract renewal.\u00a0In addition, low-cost providers will have a harder time competing as their simplistic offering won\u2019t hold up to scrutiny. 2. Make Selling More to Existing Customers Easier The cable industry, like the imaging industry, has had some difficult choices to make in recent years thanks to the advent of the internet and specialty providers like Netflix and HBO.\u00a0But trust me, they aren\u2019t taking it lying down.\u00a0 Cable providers now offer home phone, Internet and cell service in a bundled package.\u00a0Three different things that all show up on one monthly bill. These bundles allow them to become much stickier with their customers and gain more wallet share. An even greater example is Google.\u00a0There was a time when you paid individually for your email, web sharing utilities, and online document storage.\u00a0Google offers all of these services as a single user based bundle.\u00a0Just like the cable companies they are bundling and charging by user to increase wallet-share, stickiness, and customer loyalty. SBB for MPS can do the same for us in the imaging channel.\u00a0The model allows us to easily layer on additional products and services onto the same bill. CPP doesn\u2019t allow for this as the very model itself is page specific.\u00a0With SBB or user based billing we can offer rules based control software like Print Audit, Document Management software, Managed IT Services, heck, even Telephony and Cloud services. We can add all of these things simply by adding an addendum to the existing MPS contract. Unless your contract is CPP.\u00a0Then you\u2019re out of luck. Now you\u2019ve got an entirely unique sales cycle ahead of you.\u00a0The moral: Start moving to SBB and start layering additional high-margin products and services to the same contract. 3. Simplify Billing Administration Billing by page is a complicated business. We have to collect meters, either manually or with a data collection tool (local devices anybody?), and then compile a bill that may consist of hundreds of individual monochrome and color charge items depending on fleet complexity.\u00a0To make things worse, we only collect payment for print AFTER the printing has already occurred.\u00a0Our billing departments have to spend a lot of time just trying to get people to pay within an acceptable timeframe. Do you have any customers who are notorious for paying 60 to 90 days out? SBB changes both the complexity of billing as well as the amount of time it takes to get paid.\u00a0The customer receives the same unified bill every single month.\u00a0And because it\u2019s a subscription service, the customer pays for the user\u2019s ability to print at the beginning of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[82,237],"tags":[2641,303],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17845"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17845"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17849,"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17845\/revisions\/17849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAs traditional CPP has become more commonplace as an offering in the last few years it has led to a dramatic increase in competition. Customers are being inundated with alternative bids come contract renewal and the typical response is to offer a lower CPP rate to hold onto the business.\u00a0Customers don\u2019t appreciate the value we\u2019ve brought them because when we deliver exceptional service it makes managed print seem easy.\u00a0We need to deliver even more value and SBB could be exactly what the doctor ordered.\u00a0By being able to layer additional services such as digitization and document management we can deepen the customer’s reliance on our expertise.\u00a0The more things we can do to deepen the levels of service the more likely we are to demand a stronger price come contract renewal.\u00a0In addition, low-cost providers will have a harder time competing as their simplistic offering won\u2019t hold up to scrutiny.<\/p>\n
\nThe cable industry, like the imaging industry, has had some difficult choices to make in recent years thanks to the advent of the internet and specialty providers like Netflix and HBO.\u00a0But trust me, they aren\u2019t taking it lying down.\u00a0 Cable providers now offer home phone, Internet and cell service in a bundled package.\u00a0Three different things that all show up on one monthly bill. These bundles allow them to become much stickier with their customers and gain more wallet share.<\/p>\n
\nBilling by page is a complicated business. We have to collect meters, either manually or with a data collection tool (local devices anybody?), and then compile a bill that may consist of hundreds of individual monochrome and color charge items depending on fleet complexity.\u00a0To make things worse, we only collect payment for print AFTER the printing has already occurred.\u00a0Our billing departments have to spend a lot of time just trying to get people to pay within an acceptable timeframe. Do you have any customers who are notorious for paying 60 to 90 days out?<\/p>\n
\nOne of the most common questions I get from business owners when I am consulting with them around MPS operations is the best way to compensate reps that are selling a CPP based service.\u00a0I have worked with organizations that still don\u2019t feel they compensate their sales teams appropriately.\u00a0Because SBB is a fixed monthly billing amount that is constant through the life of the contract we can much more easily and accurately build commission plans that are easier for everybody to understand.\u00a0Every sales representative likes to know how much they are going to get paid for a deal and nothing makes it simpler for them to calculate than an SBB offering.<\/p>\n
\nThe first question business owners usually ask me when we talk about SBB is, \u201cWho else is doing it today?\u201d Most ask that question because they want to know that SBB is a proven model with little risk.\u00a0Others ask because they want to get in on the ground floor like they did in the early days of CPP for MPS.\u00a0Why? Because that is where the money is made!\u00a0Mature models tend to lose margin along the way. New models, if the people are buying them, come with better margins and increased win rates. SBB isn\u2019t without its nuances and hot spots and there are very few providers who have taken the plunge (so far). If you are a progressive dealership looking to lead the next wave, then SBB should be quite attractive.\u00a0If you are neck deep in an existing CPP model and worried about the risks of switching things up, SBB is likely not your cup of tea.<\/p>\n
\nThe way people choose to buy things is changing dramatically.\u00a0With technology changing so rapidly many companies are looking to preserve valuable capital and increase the number of subscription based payment methods.\u00a0Why pay for a $600 phone if it\u2019s obsolete in 2 years?\u00a0The same can be said of computers, servers, storage, and yes, printers and copiers (along with the related consumables and service items).<\/p>\n