As MPS offerings become more robust and sophisticated, so should the way you sell them. If you agree that the best way to get more from selling MPS is to add value, for example, then you should consider talking to more senior-level decision makers, if you aren’t already. “One of the first things I always do [with sales] whether it’s cost per page or SBB is to get them selling higher,” said West McDonald, vice president of business development at Print Audit. “That’s the only way to protect margin.” This is especially true if you’re currently selling to IT. “[IT] is the wrong person. The IT person doesn’t understand value. Only senior executives understand how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together,” he said.
West McDonald, Print Audit
Optimizing the way you sell MPS will likely require you to rethink your sales and marketing collateral. A clear understanding of who you are as an MPS provider–your capabilities and your market–will help you prepare better sales and marketing materials. Infrastructure providers typically will have ready-made resources that the dealer can use to market and sell MPS. CIG, for example, has marketing proposals and programs. “We’ve created a full library of customizable, vertically driven videos that dealers can use for healthcare, financial services, and legal. They can use them as templates for their own marketing,” said Luke Goldberg, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Clover Imaging Group (CIG).
Doug Johnson, LMI
LMI Solutions works with its partners to tailor resources to their particular circumstances. “Regardless of what level of MPS they are doing, we look at what it takes—assets and competencies. Are they hiring the right sales reps? Are they trained properly? Do they have the right tools and the right marketing?,” said Doug Johnson, chief strategy officer at LMI Solutions.
Dealers often need expert advice to answer that question, and that’s why service infrastructure providers like LMI Solutions take a consultative approach to sales. “Diagnose before you prescribe,” said Johnson. “Our job is to help uncover the pain in their ability to deliver MPS and understand what their challenges are and then offer sensible solutions to solve or mitigate those pain points.”
Luke Goldberg
Clover Imaging Group
Moving away from a transactional consumption model to a service model also requires a change in how you sell MPS. That means showing customers the value of the services offered and having a predictable monthly fee. Dealers often make the mistake of treating MPS as a transactional sale. “Even the simplest MPS engagement is more complex than a transactional one,” said Johnson. “There are more steps, there are more gates you have to go through, and there are more stakeholders in the customer’s environment.” Those differences need to be taken into consideration when you think about how you build an MPS sales funnel, how you compensate reps, and even what you look for in a rep when hiring. “If you don’t apply what’s different about the model to your thinking, then you try to adapt your old model to it and you never get out of the gate well on sales,” he said.
LMI Solutions is looking at seat-based billing (SBB) as a possible billing model for value-added services. “For dealers looking to go beyond monetizing just the output, there are a range of solutions that are easier to integrate into an MPS model if you’re at a seat-based price model. It makes it easier to expand your offering and monetize more of what they do,” said Johnson.
Dealers who continue to offer print services that are more transaction based have options to improve efficiency and margins while allowing them to take steps toward a true managed services model. CIG, for example, has a new Automatic Toner Fulfillment (ATF) program that uses software to determine very precisely days to empty. “There’s a lot of money lost in our business when toner cartridges are replaced prematurely. This algorithm [in the software] lets us use the cartridge to its absolute fullest extent,” said Goldberg.
