Last week Print Audit announced what they call “a disruptive new business model” for print management. Print Audit Premier is a subscription plan for office technology dealers, providing them with access to all of Print Audit’s products for a monthly fee. Premier subscribers also have access to a Web portal which will help them track the program’s three brand promises—win new customers, keep current customers, and make a lot of money. Those are promises that any dealer would be hard pressed to ignore.
What’s so disruptive about this program? “It greatly increases office equipment dealers’ profit margins on print management solution sales,” says Print Audit President John MacInnes.
John MacInnes
Dealers can charge customers for Print Audit’s software under a per page or device model, while only paying a fixed cost to Print Audit. This means that the dealer’s profits go up with every customer they sell to, notes MacInnes.
Print Audit’s statistics reveal that 80 percent of MPS and equipment deals are won using device and user assessment tools. The company also contends that Premier provides a full array of print management tools that can be used to uncover more sales opportunities, manage printing in any environment, lower print costs, and add value to the dealer’s machines in field.
MacInnes has high hopes for Print Audit Premier. He’s targeting 1,700-2,000 dealers with the goal of bringing 10 percent of those into the Print Audit Premier fold.
“If we were to pull off 200 members that would be wildly successful for us,” states MacInnes.
Those numbers, incidentally, are just for the U.S.A. and don’t include Canada or other worldwide locations where Print Audit Premier is also available.
The concept for Print Audit Premier originated about a year ago when MacInnes attended a Ricoh developer conference where he heard a speaker say that the world was moving towards a software as a service (SaaS) model and software vendors need to start thinking along those lines. Around the same time, Print Audit hired a new head of operations who discovered that the company had about 20 different billing models and 14 different constituents buying from them, which made for a complex situation.
The other relevant issue behind the concept was that most Print Audit customers typically don’t abandon Print Audit, but they bounce from dealer to dealer, in some cases moving two or three times and taking the software with them and leaving the dealer with nothing.
Acknowledging that their product works great, the challenge was how to help dealers maintain their current customers and build loyalty with those dealers from a Print Audit perspective while ensuring they’re making a ton of money. The time was ripe for a new delivery model and thus the creation of Print Audit Premier.
“Now that you own the subscription, your customers are stuck with you,” says MacInnes. “They absolutely do not want to give up the software. It’s amazing the percentage of our original end users from 11 years ago who are still using the system.”
The brand promise of making a lot of money is clearly one that most dealers won’t ignore and MacInnes estimates the average dealer will earn several times the monthly subscription cost by charging the customer a monthly per page cost per device for print management.
One of the things the program does is eliminate fixed costs for things such as bandwidth, a server, and security memberships. All of this is handled by Print Audit and included in the program. It also eliminates the costs for other printer management products, including those from Print Audit.
“The average dealer might be paying another $10,000 a year on those other products and the costs of that are mostly getting absorbed by their customer because the customer is buying it and the customer owns the software,” explains MacInnes. “These costs will essentially be absorbed and eliminated in the subscription plan because you’re at a base subscription price every single month.”
The target market for Print Audit Premier is dealer principles. The cost for the program is about $5,000 per month.
“We want to make sure the program flies, so the first 50 dealers who sign up will pay $2,500 per month,” says MacInnes. “We want these guys to blow it out of the park and we expect the first 50 are going to be the flywheel for the next 200.”
The goal is to have 100 dealers in the program by the end of the year.
The pricing is not out of line with what MacInnes has seen dealers spending for all the various components of a print management system without adding any profitability.
“They were easily spending $50,000 a year,” says MacInnes.
Dealers who sign up need at least one person on their staff trained to handle first-level support. Print Audit will handle second-level support, however, the dealer will handle basic questions like how to run reports, how to add users, and do the installation as well.
Of course this model fits nicely into the MPS world.
“One of the problems people have with MPS today is they really don’t have a clear path to good profitability on the system,” says MacInnes. “This allows them to add value to the system, make sure they keep those customers, and charge their customers for it as well.”
MacInnes expects dealers will also see value in the Print Audit Premier Web portal. Dealers can use this to access their own software licenses. It also details how many customers they’ve won and will show how many customers they kept as well as how much value out of the software licenses they’ve placed.
With the initial roll out of Print Audit Premier, MacInnes is confident dealers will see the value and embrace the uniqueness of this new print management model.
“It’s so radically different from anything anyone else has offered before,” concludes MacInnes “There’s a ton of opportunity and we’re hoping if we build it they will come.”
Dealers interested in signing up or learning about Print Audit Premier can visit: www.printaudit.com/mps7
