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Managed Print Services
Print.IT Reseller
30
time to make that commitment is when
you are making money,” he warned.
“When you charge a cost per page you are
going to make money when a customer
prints. You don’t have to be efficient. In the
future, if you get paid on a per user, per
seat basis, you have to be more efficient.”
Many of the warnings from Crowley
and other experts were echoed by John
Taylor of M2 in his talk,
How to Succeed
In Changing Your Business To MPS and
Beyond
. He, too, questioned how well the
channel was delivering MPS – “After one
year, Canon said we were the best MPS
partner across the whole of Europe. We are
only good, so the benchmark must be low.”
He also underlined how difficult it was to
change. “It is hard work: there is blood
on the carpet and blood, sweat and tears,"
he said.
Not an appealing prospect, but he left
no doubt that change was essential. “We
see so many resellers who feel the urgency
isn’t there to change. Three years ago
local resellers used to talk about the joys
of 7-8p per colour page. Three weeks ago
I saw some of the OEMs and saw prices
at 1.9p, 2.4p and 2.7p per colour page. If
I’ve been enjoying margins of 7-8p, I’ve
never had to change my business. They are
the people who are at risk of not making
changes when they can,” he said.
Taylor advises resellers to look at
the people in their business, start there,
face brutal facts and take action – and
be passionate about what you do. “We
changed the people, changed the thinking
and changed the actions,” he said. Key
changes made by M2 included re-aligning
management teams; setting up multi-
layered customer expert teams; introducing
different reward structures; creating a
complex relationship/engagement model;
outsourcing warehousing and logistics;
and developing its own MPS infrastructure,
which it then pushed out to customers so
that they had complete visibility of how M2
was performing.
As a result, M2 has enjoyed impressive
growth over the last three years: it has
grown its colour device base by 124%,
grown new service revenue by 74% and
increased the service profitability on
annuities by 183%.
Another company that has made
a success of MPS is OneDoc Managed
Print Services, albeit with a different
approach to M2. As CEO Kevin Morris
“We changed
the people,
changed the
thinking and
changed the
actions”
explained, the American company with
offices in Oklahoma, Tulsa and New York
“outsources every facet of business except
sales”.
Morris says that OneDoc Managed
Print Services is very strong in Stages 1
and 2 (Control and Optimise/Ongoing
Management) and has some Stage 3
implementations (Enhance/Business
Process Improvement), but does very little
in Stage 4 (Integrate/Business Process
Optimisation) where MPS is just one
component alongside IT outsourcing,
business process optimisation and
managed services – “I have a reluctance to
be an MSP” he said.
The subject of his talk was
Whose
Hand to Shake
when selling managed print
services. For him, there is only one person
your sales people should be talking to. “All
the time, that is the CFO (chief financial
officer). They are the ones who at the end
of the day control and have all the budgets
in an organisation. IT is fine but they don’t
control all budgets in an organisation. We
never call on IT.”
This approach underpins the company’s
recruitment strategy and Morris advises
others who are keen to succeed in MPS to
adopt the same approach. “Recruit people
who have had experience of selling to
C-level executives. They all will say they
have, so you must ask them for names
and numbers of executives they have dealt
with. If they can’t provide them, they don't
get the job,” he said.
Bringing leasing up-to-date
The transition to MPS has created
complexity for leasing companies, too,
as Chris Cowell, sales director, office
equipment division, BNP Paribas Leasing
Solutions explained in his presentation
The
role of leasing in the changing face of print
.
He traced the evolution of print from 1990
when there were fixed five-year terms, vanilla
contracts, basic technology and a box shifting
culture to the present day when print has
converged with IT, resellers are selling software
solutions and a ‘walk in and take-over model’ is
very common.
For leasing companies, this raises questions
like What are the Ts&Cs and who signs for them?;
Do we get goods title and how? – because the
leasing model requires ownership; If there is
software involved, is BNP Paribas Leasing in the
licence chain?; If the products are being serviced,
who are they being serviced by?; If there are
warranties, how do they apply?; If the vendor
goes bust, what is our relationship with the end
user?; What sectors is the MPS being sold into?.
Despite these complexities BNP Paribas
Leasing has responded to changes in the industry
by enabling resellers to include more software
and soft costs, such as implementation, training
and audits, in contracts.
In 2010, it started to do 100% software
contracts, even for technology that it did not
own, and this year it launched We Manage
Print, which allows your customers to acquire
new print hardware with a fixed quarterly fee
based on a transparent cost per print and bundle
servicing for the existing print estate into the
same contract, along with one-off costs such as
professional services, training and print audits.
Cowell said that this contract enables
resellers to becomes a one-stop-shop for all
servicing needs and eases their transition to
becoming a true MPS provider.
“We are allowing vendors to fund soft
costs. We say ‘If you have done consultancy
and installation include it on the document and
invoice’. We are seeing a lot more software
included in agreements and therefore expect to
see more soft costs as well,” he said.
07966 114245
Chris Cowell, Sales Director. Office Equipment,
BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions
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