Are You Thinking at the Speed of Print or the Speed of Content?
Time is compressing.
It was just in 2009, a mere three years ago – or actually, just under 36 months – when MpS started showing up in its current form. At conferences, show floors were jam-packed with MpS propositions; Konica Minolta, OKI, Xerox, LMI, GreatAmerica, Digital Gateway, ECi, Compass, Strategy Development, M2M, Synnex, NER and many more were “all-in.” Granted, it wasn’t really MpS. The fliers had “MPS” stickers plastered all over them; the sales classes mentioned MpS selling cycles, TCO and the like; but the content was still copier sales, copier leasing, toner cartridges. Desk-side toner delivery/auto-fulfill, just fresh off the whiteboard, was being touted and sold. Yet some proclaimed MpS to be just another marketing point or passing fad, like black and white to color or analogue to digital.
Today, not even 36 months along, automatic toner delivery is a standard, remote monitoring happens every day, and MpS represents a secular change – not a fad. Now we’re talking about managed services, a help desk versus a dispatch desk, and content on screens versus marks on paper.
Time is compressing.
Take a closer look at the last six months, back to June 2011. Ricoh announced a $300 million investment into MDS and had just embarked upon their cross-country MDS cavalcade. Xerox was regrouping on PagePack. Office supplies moved from wallflower to center stage. HP lost its mind, but IPG stayed the course and started to digest Printelligent. Steve Jobs crossed the River Styx. Meanwhile, Apple sold 11.2 million iPads – and that was in one quarter, and not at $99 a pop.
Today, just six months later, Wall Street is not happy with our OEMs. We in the trenches are strapping deck chairs together hoping to float into the calm waters of managed services – wow. Twelve months ago, nobody knew what managed services was; today, everybody is an expert.
The point is this: Everything is moving faster than it ever has before. We are communicating with each other instantaneously on a global scale – and guess what? We aren’t printing agendas, letters or emails, and we don’t fax, but we’re all on the same page.
I contend that the lack of paper may have a bit to do with cost or convenience but is more related to speed and efficiency. In the amount of time it takes to pick up a print job – say, 4.9 minutes – 5,700 tweets are tweeted (TweetSpeed), 10,500 emails are sent (Pingdom), 1.5 million statuses are updated (SearchEngineLand) and 10 million Google searches are performed (SearchEngineLand). This makes even 120 ppm seem awful slow, right?
How do we, the people in an industry that was built on toner and fuser oil, survive in these content-driven times?
Hang on to your existing business while looking for the safe harbor of other models – that’s all. This is bigger than the shift from copiers to MpS; nobody will be able to fake their way through this storm. Re-examine your current relationships and open yourself and your business to new alternatives.
Consider managed services. There is a growing number of decent managed service providers who don’t want to sell direct – refreshing to think, isn’t it? Managed services is a high-margin, low-overhead proposition. There are no quotas and barely any OEMs to deal with – consider that.
As the cost of technology decreases – and it will – people are going to naturally move toward the fastest and easiest mode of communication available. Print is the slowest manner in which to transport information or convey a message. The world is moving faster; you need to as well.
There is, of course, one more thing: Don’t be hesitant about moving into the managed services space. The current skill set of your sales staff is sufficient because the managed services value proposition is simpler to get around than MpS. Here’s the dirty little secret: If you can successfully and profitably direct an MpS practice, running and selling managed services is easy. We just need to shift from the speed of print to the speed of thought.
Posted by Greg Walters on 02/09/2012