Greg Walters
Greg Walters seems to have done just about everything over the course of his career. He’s sold managed print services, he’s been an industry consultant with his new company Walters & Shutwell, he’s been a blogger, and he’s been a guest speaker at industry events where he talks about MPS and other industry trends, and he’s the current president of The Managed Print Services Association (MPSA). He’s also not shy about shaking things up. His late, great The Death of the Copier blog (www.thedeathofthecopier.blogspot.com/) was known for mixing cutting edge commentary with sometimes controversial analysis about industry issues and trends. It’s a good life and any conversation with Walters, a loose cannon and self-proclaimed technologist, is never dull. In a recent conversation he shared his perspectives on the MPSA, MPS while also contradicting what others have said about the path to MPS success. In the first part of this interview we’re going to concentrate on MPS. In the second part, that I’ll be posting on July 26, we’ll talk about what’s happening with the MPSA and the relevance of that organization.
This is a question I usually ask towards the end of an interview, but I’m going to start with it, after all the years you spent selling managed print, what are some of the things you know now about it now that you wish you knew when you first got involved with it?
Walters: That’s the $150,000 question. What I didn’t know then that I know now that has the most value is how important and how clear upper management/ownership has to be in bringing a successful MPS practice into fruition. I’ve got plenty of examples on paper of ownership saying, ‘Let’s go for it,’ but then they just let it go.
What I learned to do is sell it even harder to ownership, encouraging them to make it part of their vision as opposed to just a fold-on practice. What it really comes down to is the vision of the overall business. The same with BTA—they’re there to sell copiers and MPS is a fold on that allows them to keep controlling their accounts and gain more revenue, but it still isn’t part of the vision of the business. It’s part of their philosophy and an added nice to have. I wish I could have been able to affect more change in that direction.
What’s the knowledge of customers and prospects in the field these days when you walk in and say ‘Managed Print’?
Walters: The person telling the story of MPS must have a clear picture of what their [concept of] MPS is. In the beginning we defined MPS as everything and went to the C-level and that wasn’t as effective as it could have been. Then we went back to the trenches and did bottom-up type selling and ultimately watered the definition of MPS down from the Photizo example of pure MPS and the various stages to simply toner and service on cartridge-based devices just like the copier.
That’s a simple message and easy for people to understand. The big difference is trying to describe it to a prospect four or five years ago was different because it was brand new. Now everyone that I speak to knows what MPS means to them and it usually just boils down to toner and service on printers.
But MPS is so much more than that?
Walters: What I’ve learned, and a lot of people are doing the same thing, and that’s not to fight that. Most people have an idea what it is, but it’s gotten to the point where it’s tough to reeducate them. You might as well just sell it, get the contract in, work with it at that level, educate them as you go and move above and beyond if you can. If you think of the traditional third-party toner suppliers for printers, all those guys, what MPS really has done is what they typically have done already. On that front, it’s much easier to describe and most prospects have an idea what it is. So you have a choice as a provider to maintain that level of MPS or evolve the engagement with that client into something more than just toner and service and begin reducing machines, workflow, and above and beyond that all the way up to the help desk and beyond.
Not to generalize, but many consultants and dealers who have been successful with MPS say you need to go after the C-level when selling MPS, now you’re saying it’s okay to sell MPS at the lower levels of an organization. How did you arrive at that conclusion? Did you initially go after the C-level and then back down?
Walters: Absolutely, at one time I was a proponent of that [approach]. Actually, it’s not one or the other, it’s both or everything. To stay away from purchasing and facilities is probably the best course you can take.
Why do you say that?
Walters: Because those guys are going to commoditize everything. Unless you’re selling a commodity and can walk in, give them a price and then leave. You don’t have to invest that much into an engagement and if that’s all it takes and it’s your world and you’re happy in it, by all means sell it to the purchaser. But if you want to go above and beyond, you should be positioning it from the beginning to get higher and look for people with vision.
In the old days, if you couldn’t get to the C-level you moved on. That might have been appropriate for six months because the market was huge and there were multiple opportunities. Now I’m more apt to say let’s try multiple entry points.
Are customer expectations surrounding managed print realistic or unrealistic in your experience?
Walters: It’s realistic now.The talk tracks are more realistic. Before we were offering things we couldn’t really deliver and we couldn’t deliver it as smoothly as we do now. Those kinks have been worked out. If we’re offering toner and service and desk-side toner delivery, we’ve pretty much got that down whether we’re doing it ourselves or using someone like a Supplies Network to deliver for us.
Many manufacturers have introduced their own MPS programs, some have been out for awhile, others are new or new and improved, what’s your take on those?
Walters: As long as I have plants in Japan making copiers, everything else is just marketing. If ABC OEM has 12 plants in Japan kicking out color copiers or whatever it is—MPS today, document management three years ago, scan to the cloud in a couple of months, it’s still geared to moving more equipment. It’s not really there to reduce the number of machines in the field or reduce the costs. And that goes for any of the manufacturers. There’s nothing wrong with this, just reality.
When you’re going up against somebody with an OEM-type program and the whole premise is to sell more hardware, how do you compete with that? Is it transparent to the customer in a competitive situation especially when you know deep down what’s happening on the other side?
Walters: What I try to do is define MPS and educate the prospect on what the goals of this program are. ‘I don’t have your fleet, I don’t have to worry about quotas, I don’t have to worry about selling new machines or doing 1-1 placements. I’m truly here to look at everything and I’m not saying we have to replace everything today. We don’t. Let’s go in, take a look at it and reduce the costs first by looking at your procurement costs. If you’re buying cartridges now, and I move you to a CPI, typically you’ll be able to save X amount.’
The goal with my MPS is to reduce everything, not just the cost, but the number of machines, the number of copiers, whatever it is. It doesn’t matter, if it makes sense. Does it make sense to replace everyone’s desktops? It might make sense to replace 80 percent of them, we don’t know that yet because I’m not motivated to land 50 HPs a month or put in 12 Konica Minolta’s or five Toshiba’s. My motivation is to truly reduce your costs. I’m still making money and I don’t have a plant building machines I need to sell. It’s a land grab, everyone’s trying to put their boxes in your office and they’re secondarily concerned about reducing your costs in a true sense.
You do a fair amount of speaking at conferences, particularly those focused on MPS, what’s the one question that seems to come up a lot lately?
Walters: The last six months people have been asking, ‘I’ve done this MPS, I believe in Stage 1, Stage 2, Stage 3, but I’m looking at managed services now and considering bringing in a Help Desk and adding PC workstation and storage monitoring to my MPS engagements. How can I do that? Should I purchase a small managed services company or grow it internally?’
What’s your response?
Walters: It depends. It’s not as bad as making the jump into MPS. MPS is a different business model. If you’re going to add a Help Desk the business model is still the same, mostly recurring revenue. If you’re going to add monitoring of workstations, laptops, and maybe dispatch and service, it’s basically the same. It’s can be easier because you’re invoicing by asset not volume.
The biggest challenge, and this is nothing new, is integrating your infrastructure. For example, E-Automate might be really good at meter reads and XYZ, but adequate at billing per asset per month. Actually I think it’s pretty good. But do you integrate ConnectWise or one of those IT-type software programs with your existing software? Now it’s the same thing all over again like when we had to figure out how to integrate [the various data collection programs] into our e-Automate system. Now we’re going to add workstations and laptops and how are we going to integrate monitoring that and convert that into invoices? That’s an infrastructure question, but not as big as going from copiers to MPS.
The other side that’s difficult is the sales approach. The IT guys don’t like printers, don’t like output devices, and seriously dislike copiers. If they have any experience at all they remember the time when they loaded up all these connected copiers and then there was an update for whatever reason and all their copiers falling off the network and the drivers are all gone. Typically any time a copier guy has tried to approach an IT guy it just didn’t work out. The copier folks are a little more aggressive than what IT guys are used to and there’s a stigma you have to get away from and it may be just taking the word copier out of your business name.
Ultimately I don’t think it’s as big a jump for a copier or printer guy to go from basic copier showroom-type sales to MPS to a NOC and a Help Desk as it would be for a VAR to come down into our environment – the VARs are having a more difficult time shifting to our style of selling.
Have you ever been one of those proponents that a dealer has to get into managed print or they’re going to die, and do you see that philosophy transferring itself to managed services as well?
Walters: I was, but not anymore – I do not believe not getting into MPS will be the sole reason your dealership ultimately fails. The doom and gloom has kind of passed. You’re either there or not. Honestly, I believe printing and copying is dwindling and we’re not going to have the same number of units go out as we did in 2007 ever again.
Even if you’re already in MPS the universal pool of printers is going to shrink and MPS is going to dwindle. To move out of print into service that’s the bridge. Real MPS is designed to shrink the fleet. That’s going to happen no matter what, whether there’s MPS or not. If you’re in MPS, you need to keep your eyes open for the next thing and that’s managed services.
In three years 60-80 percent of machines are going to be under agreement so then it just starts to whittle away at the base. If you move to managed services you’re overhead has to drop. You don’t need 12 technicians or three dispatchers. Everything is going to shrink, shrink, shrink. Brick and mortar—you really don’t need that anymore. You’re doing everything remotely. Your sales guys still need to go out and do face to face, but your admin starts to drop, your service department drops…that’s a big change.
And what do you have to say to people who say that MPS has become a commodity?
Walters: I see it more of a definition issue. If we are defining MPS as simply toner and service delivery on single function/multi-function laser devices, then yes, MPS is a commodity. But then again, at this level, it always has been.
Once we branch out beyond delivery times and cost per image and examine what happens before and after the device, we truly move into the world of business process and workflow – neither is easily turned into a commodity and both are functions we’ve dabbled in for over a decade.
