It’s pretty obvious that the success of its dealer partners is at the heart of FP Mailing Solutions’ sales and marketing approach. The global manufacturer of postage meters and solutions for everything that touches mail goes to great pains to ensure their resellers are put in the best position possible to enjoy success. And the support FP provides dealers following sales, technical service and administrative training is merely the beginning.
managing director
for North America
at FP Mailing Solutions
The Berlin-based firm (Francotyp-Postalia in its native Germany), with U.S. headquarters in the Chicago suburb of Addison, Illinois, invests in lead generation for its dealer roster of 175 companies. With the help of search engine optimization, paid search and lead vetting, FP has spared no expense in ensuring dealer reps have qualified, interested prospects to call on. Mike Hannon, FP Mailing Solutions’ managing director for North America, believes dealers and their account representatives can gain an even greater advantage by making mailing the primary topic of a prospect engagement.
Hannon and his staff have spent the last four years focusing on the U.S. Postal Services mandate to swap out postage meters that met information-based indicia (IBI) standards in favor of those that abide by intelligent mail indicia (IMI). With that in the rear view, they’re pivoting to show how their full complement of mailing gear can provide a distinct point of differentiation for resellers. In our latest installment of Getting to Know You, Hannon explores the value propositions that have positioned FP Mailing Solutions as the ideal vehicle for exploring one of the office dealer community’s most coveted diversifications.
Talk a little about the evolution of FP Mailing Solutions and the channels it serves.
Hannon: We’re a 102-year-old European company, publicly traded on the German exchange, that’s been in the U.S. since around 1960. The company initially sold cash registers. We moved heavily into the mailing side, and we’re one of five postage meter manufacturers in the world. We’re represented directly in 15 countries and are dealer-only in another 10 to 15. We’re one of the smaller manufacturers, but we’re innovation leaders. We were the first to introduce the digital mail machine in the U.S. and the first to convert over to intelligent mail indicia, the new USPS technology. We offer the full suite of solutions that touch mail: folder inserters, addressing systems, smart lockers, address management software and mail stream solutions. In other words, we follow the mail piece and the envelope. During the last 10 years, we’ve been active on the digital transformation side with online shipping, parcel shipping, asset tracking and postal analytics, as well as introducing a digital signature software platform. While we’re expanding our base quite a bit beyond mail, it’s still our core offering.
Do you serve channels outside the office dealer space?
Hannon: Yes, but not many. We have our direct sales team, but they predominantly offer low-end rentals and customer retention for dealers. Everything else is call center operations for the service side. We don’t market and sell online; we predominantly use the office equipment dealer channel. We don’t sell direct/have branches across the U.S. where we’re competing with dealers. Our only U.S. office is just outside Chicago, and that’s the North American headquarters.
How would you characterize 2024 and Q1 2025 from a business standpoint?
Hannon: Much of the noise in 2024 was around the decertification of information-based indicia, an older security technology for the mailing equipment. The big change from IBI to IMI wasn’t visible from the customer standpoint but rather geared toward USPS security protocol on the back end. It marks a big step forward. With the new IMI standard, the equipment has to connect to us and the USPS once a day. As a security measure, it will lock itself out in the event of an outage or theft if it doesn’t connect securely in three days. The decertification was announced in 2020; that meant everyone had to convert almost their entire install base over the next four years. Now that the upgrade is pretty much done, aside from a few stragglers, it’s back to new business. We’re focusing on the ancillary products and the whole solution suite beyond the mailing machine. It changes the conversations we’ve been having. Business-wise, the past few years have been really good. Q1 of 2025 was strong, but now we’re dealing with tariffs.
What were some of the highlights for your company during the past year? What resonated with you the most?
Hannon: In 2024, we brought on another new product from the OEM side, the FPi 4000 folder inserter. We’ve made some big advancements on the digital side. But our February dealer summit is one of our biggest highlights of the year. It was held in Las Vegas this year, and we try to bring in as many dealer partners as we can. We usually have a good showing from our vendors and sponsors. I try to give a platform to our dealers, sponsors and vendors to ensure they have the chance to meet once a year. These shows tend to grow annually. Next year we’re going to Hilton Head, South Carolina. We move the show around every year, and we bring a lot of our staff; it gives people the opportunity to connect and socialize. This is still a relationship-driven business, and it’s important to have connections and conversations that extend beyond the phone or email.
What is your strategy for growing FP’s dealer base? Do you face competition for dealer mindshare with Pitney Bowes and Quadient?
Hannon: I’m not competing too much mindshare-wise with a dealer, Pitney or Quadient. The real challenge is getting the dealer’s sales rep to sell our product over another they have available to them. That is where my mindshare battles take place. We have 10% of the market, Quadient is in the 20% range and Pitney has the rest. It’s not a case of the three companies fighting over the net-new customer; we’re pulling business from each other. We’re putting our new-customer acquisition offers up against Pitney’s and Quadient’s retention offers. What gives us an edge is Pitney and Quadient use their call centers, while FP has local dealers talking to the customer. That personal touch resonates with them much more than a random person reaching out from a call center.
The other unique thing for us is that we’re a postage meter manufacturer, but we don’t manufacture the inserter lines we offer. We offer inserters from Pitney and Quadient, and we’re the only one that can offer every product in our space. Pitney can’t offer Quadient’s inserters and vice versa. We give the dealer a unique offering; they get to select from a pool that allows them to better serve their customers based on their needs.
Are we seeing printed mail pieces rebound?
Hannon: I’ve been with FP for 18 years, and back in 2007, there were probably 1.4 million mailing machines in the U.S. market. The latest figure today is closer to 850,000, but it took a significant amount of time to drop. The biggest percentage drop took place in 2009–2010, but ever since it’s been about a half to one percent annually. Mailing has been viewed as a declining market over the past decade or so. We’ve seen some client base decline, and COVID cleared out a lot of businesses. However, many of the companies that survived have witnessed double-digit volume increase from an imprints and postage spend standpoint year over year. Verticals and customers are using mail more now than they did pre-COVID. While it’s not the perception from outside our industry, the truth is more marketing campaigns are moving from digital/email back to USPS mail. Having that tangible mail piece is still more effective.
What are some of the ways you work with reseller partners to help them become more successful selling the FP line?
Hannon: We do a lot of lead generation for our dealers. We buy leads, do SEO and paid search, plus we validate them. At that point, we turn those leads over to the dealers. We don’t charge them for the leads. If I have five dealers in a region, I’ll rotate the lead distribution to keep it equal. We make sure that we’re providing resellers every opportunity we can with their existing customers as well as prospects looking within their market. We provide technical training; dealer techs go through physical training on the mailing equipment before we can authorize them. From the sales standpoint, our regional managers will go out and train dealer reps. We also do an onboarding program that will take the dealer’s admin staff through our dealer portal so the team knows how to do their orders and cover any questions they may have on invoicing or commission. Our sales pros and marketing team will also work with dealers to produce customized marketing pieces. For their websites, we’ll create inline frames so they don’t have to worry about listing the products or updating.
We try to do as much as we can on the full-service support side because the dealer is our biggest customer. The end-user is the dealer’s customer, not ours. Teaching them how to sell is important because our industry is niche and there aren’t as many products available. We advise dealer account reps to lead with mail equipment in their conversations with prospects; if they lead with copiers, they might get shut out. When they center the conversation on the mail machine, it’s an entry point that allows them to get as sticky as they can with that customer. Reps all have their own existing install base where they can get a little stickier. But when it comes to prospects, lead with mail.
What does the future hold for FP in terms of new product development? Is there anything in the works from a partnership standpoint?
Hannon: At this point, we’re focusing on some digital products. We’re bringing our digital signature product into the U.S., working on smart lockers and bringing more focus to the inserters and other products. Some of it is home grown, others will be brought on through a partner OEM. We’re close on a couple things, but there’s nothing we’re ready to reveal. There’s not much development on the physical mail side, so we’re making sure we have other products for the dealers to go wider with clients.
Tell us a little about your marketing strategy within the office dealer space.
Hannon: Executive Connection Summit and BTA are the two main events we do, but we’re not going heavy on the recruitment side. I’ve been asked to do some peer group meetings, so I’m exploring them as well. But since we rely on the dealer channel, we’re not broad-blasting into markets. We use a highly targeted marketing approach. We have true partnerships, so it really needs to make sense for the dealer to bring us on and for FP to have the dealer added to that market. That’s really important to us. When we go through the recruitment and onboarding with a dealer, we find out the geographic areas they want to cover. We’ll evaluate the size of the area, determine what the market can bear and get the count on the number of postal machines in that ZIP code. Since we know how big the opportunity is, we find out how much a prospective dealer needs to make in revenue or profitability. It has to be strategic; it doesn’t make sense to bring 30 dealers on in a region and have them choke each other out. They’ll end up hating me and each other, and that’s not good.
What will be the keys to growth moving forward?
Hannon: The only way to grow is through two main things: eat what you’ve got, and add net-new—nothing groundbreaking there. As always, we’ll continue to strengthen our partners and the product portfolio we have, listening to our dealers to see if there’s something close to mail that either we can develop or partner with another company to bring to market. Getting everything that touches the mail piece brings dealers closer to being a single-source provider for their customers. That’s where the dealer is going to grow. The more products a dealer has from FP, the more likely it’s going to turn to us for another offering. Teaching the dealers to lead with mail lets them win that new business they wouldn’t by leading with other products. So get in there and lead with mail, win the mail machine!
Aside from the product and portfolio, dealers benefit from our systems and support. Our customer service and support is quite robust. Dealers and their clients need to know they can reliably call into our customer service. We’ll be there and make sure that they’re happy, which gives them that peace of mind.
What are your company’s goals for the next 12 months, and what will success look like in your eyes?
Hannon: Globally, we’re looking at new projects and processes for handling things. And we had a new group CEO join us last year. It’s made a real difference opening inter-country collaboration because there were some products and offerings that Europe had available that we didn’t and things we had that Europe didn’t. In the U.S., we’ve been updating our ERP systems, and I’m hoping this summer we’ll have our new launch. That will allow us to update our dealer portal in the second half of this year. From an administrative standpoint, we haven’t refreshed our dealer portal in probably seven or eight years. We’re starting to look into using AI in a few places in our workspace as well, with our first focus on the admin side. If we can help a dealer get a contract filled out and processed faster, with fewer errors, it will be a major plus. We’re also looking to automate some of our support resources. We have a vast library of videos and training knowledge scattered among four or five different systems. AI can help unify these systems or at least aggregate the data within them. Focusing on some of these areas will help FP Mailing Solutions enjoy a strong second half of 2025 and beyond.
