Quantifying the managed print needs of their customers is proving to be a tricky and “time-consuming” problem for MPS providers.
In an interview with Channelnomics, Zack McDonald, founder of MPS provider TUI Total Solutions, revealed the major obstacle confronting those in his company’s line of work; namely, quantifying customer needs while trying to “take control of their customers’ entire accounts”.
“You want to be selling them printers, you want to own that account. You want to be the only one in there with devices that print, scan, fax, et cetera,” he said.
Despite its success “with large managed print deals”, such as those with NASCAR, which have helped the company to take its business “nationally”, McDonald said that quantifying customers’ managed print needs “can be challenging”.
“The challenge really is – and has been for a long time – to be able to quantify what they’re spending,” McDonald said. “A lot of people, when you want to get to those printers, they’ve got USB printers they bought from Office Depot, [for example], and they don’t know how many cartridges they buy. Trying to quantify that is labor intensive.
“There are a lot of tools to help you, but you still have got to…break out the Excel spreadsheet, and you’ve got to do the math and it’s very time-consuming. That is still the biggest challenge we have today.”
With the acquisition of bigger accounts, McDonald revealed that TUI “had to learn to service printers spread out across various offices”.
“The challenge is to be able to quantify and show that client how you can save them money by replacing the printers they’re using now with a printer from us that we can put under maintenance-free,” McDonald said. “That’s been a constant. We’ve been trying to replace printers now for 10 years, and it’s still a challenge.”
TUI is currently shifting its focus from “discussions about speeds and feeds” to “how it can enable compatibility” and what “relevant add-ons” can be provided, TUI’s founder concluded.