Analysis: The myth of managed print

“Many organisations are discovering that it [MPS] is a little harder to deliver than it is to sell,” says Neil Tilley, CEO and co-founder of print specialists Upstream, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fuji Xerox Australia.

“If you’re going to be a quality MPS provider are you still going to sell product the way you used to?
“MPS salespeople need to be genuinely interested in helping customer solve problems rather than being that foot-in-the-door ‘vacuum cleaner’ salesman. MPS is not a side line – it is a business.”

Tilley also advises that MPS providers have a clear idea about the sort of company they would be most able to serve. “Identify the size of customer and industry verticals. Providing MPS for a company with 50 staff is quite a different proposition to managing a company with 300 staff.

“The mistake a lot of SMB providers make is to say ‘yep, we’ll do it all’.”

According to CSG’s Davies, one of the more common oversights in the deployment of managed print solutions is that not enough attention is given to the importance of managing change, both for the customer and the supplier.

Davies says that for most resellers looking to enter the MPS space, they need to fundamentally change the way they do business; how they market, sell, deploy and support. At the same time they need to guide their clients through the process of changing how they think about printing and document management.

“A lot of people underestimate the changes involved in rolling out an MPS solution,” Davies says.

“When you change the way that people print you change the way they do business.”

The big opportunity for resellers, especially those just starting out in MPS, is to differentiate themselves from established print suppliers, many of whom have long become accustomed to customers simply paying their invoices, and for whom the new paradigm in business printing may be difficult for them to embrace.