At Print Partner, our goal is to build relationships between our MSP partners and our parent company, Green Office Partner.
Print Partner is the trusted managed print services and document solutions provider for the clients of hundreds of MSPs across the country. Until someone else comes along, we are the only print provider that is wholly aligned with the needs and goals of managed service providers.
We offer value to MSPs in three primary ways:
- Protection: Unlike many other print providers, we don’t offer IT services that compete with our MSP partners, and we never will. Work with us, and we’ll protect you from print vendors that try to poach your clients.
- Collaboration: Sick of troubleshooting printers and copiers? Work with us, and we’ll handle our shared customers’ print-related troubles for you. If clients call about devices you can’t troubleshoot over the phone, send them our way, and we’ll take care of it.
- Compensation: We pay you for referrals! For each deal we close, we’ll pay the person who registers the opportunity at least $500 for the introduction and an additional $250 per $25K in revenue the deal brings us. For the MSP, we’ll pay $1,000 per 11x17 MFP sold, $100 per printer sold, and 5% recurring revenue on the client’s print allotment. And we’ll provide exceptional client service while we’re at it.
The value that we provide is clear to any MSP owner. Send deals our way to protect your business relationships, save your staff’s time on print-related calls, and make some extra cash.
But you may be asking: how exactly do you make an introduction to Print Partner? How do you initiate the print conversation with your clients?
In this article, we’ll go over ways that you can effectively connect your clients with Print Partner so that you can start reaping the many benefits we offer to our MSP partners.
1. Identify an Opportunity
Let’s start at square one. You want to make an introduction, but to whom?
You may have a client in mind already - if so, great!
But if you are just starting to think about referrals and haven’t identified a good one, start by considering Print Partner’s target audience.
To qualify for our standard referral program, we require new prospects to have the potential to spend at least $500 monthly on our services and solutions.
To hit that amount, we look for a mix of the following qualities:
- The prospect has 100+ office employees. To take full advantage of our robust document workflow suite, they must have enough staff members to appreciate our solutions.
- They operate across multiple locations in different states and provinces that rely heavily on print.
- They rely on at least four big A3 copiers with some smaller supplementary printers.
- They either print a moderate volume of color pages, a high volume of black and white pages, or a mix. As a ballpark statistic, to spend $500/month on MPS services, a client must print around 50,000 mono pages, 5,000 color pages, or some combination of both.
- The prospect has complex faxing and printing needs and could benefit from solutions such as XMFax, PaperCut, PrinterLogic, Square 9, Umango, or similar solutions.
This list is by no means exhaustive, but these points will hopefully give you some green flags to look for when considering sending over your clients.
Clients that spend at least $500 per month are Print Partner’s gold standard. But if you have clients that fall below this amount, have no fear! We will happily get them taken care of as well.
We offer a program for smaller opportunities that do not have the potential to spend $500/month with us. The Xerox Direct Program is a great way to get your clients serviced and still make a commission for your business. For more details, read: The No More Minimums! Print Partner's Xerox Direct Program Explained.
2. Prospect for Quality Referrals
Once you’ve identified one or more prospects you’d like to refer to us, it’s time to test the waters and see if they’re open to an introduction.
You can go about this a number of ways depending on your style.
On the Fly
Many of our MSP partners elect to casually probe for interest at QBRs or other check-ins about their clients’ print services and equipment. If they hear pain points, they simply mention that they have a preferred print vendor (us!), and ask the prospect if it’d be alright if they introduced them to us.
Marketing Campaigns
Some MSPs elect to be more proactive and conduct a full marketing campaign, with a mass outreach to their list of candidates. We have found that many MSPs have active marketing programs and are actively looking for more content to talk about beyond BDR/Security/etc.
If this is your plan, fantastic! We will be glad to support your initiatives - in fact, check out our Print Partner Collateral Suite for premade materials you are free to repurpose.
Explaining Our Assessments
At meetings or in your campaign, you can explain to your clients that Green Office Partner has a highly thorough and hands-on approach to (assessing) your client’s technology suite, studying it from top to bottom. We examine their current device fleet, workflows, processes, and organizational/physical layout.
When appropriate, we fly our team out to do a walkthrough of their organization to create a well-rounded understanding of their needs, and subsequently build a proposal for (consisting of) equipment, service, and supplementary solutions to transform their business.
It is an in-depth process - for more details, read: What is a Print Assessment?
But if you prefer a more hands-off approach, that works too!
We are not looking to make more work for your business - whatever small amount of effort you can dedicate to improving your customer’s print posture by referring them to Print Partner, we will graciously accept.
3. Register the Deal
Our referral process is very simple. If you are new to our program, you’ll first register in our Referral Program on this webpage.
If you are already enrolled in our partnership, go to our ‘Submit a Referral’ page and enter the information for your prospect.
Once the deal has been registered in our system, your prospect will be assigned to one of our sales representatives if one has not already assigned one to you.
Registering deals into our system will ensure the introduction process stays on the rails, with no deals or details falling through the cracks.
4. Optional: Install Data Collection Agent
After you’ve registered the deal into our system, we recommend that you install a data collection agent (DCA) onto your prospect’s system prior to making an introduction.
This will allow us to observe their print usage and habits - we can see how much they print, how they currently route and automate their document workflow, and many other things.
Using this information, we can construct and craft a proposal that is tailored to meet your prospect’s specific needs, and will exponentially increase our chances of closing the deal.
While the DCA can be an incredible resource for our team, we acknowledge that some prospects may be sensitive to the installation of unauthorized software.
If you’ve built a solid relationship of trust with your clients, this should not be an issue. But for certain clients that you’re less familiar with, you may want to get their approval prior to installation, or just skip the DCA entirely. We trust your judgment in this area.
The DCA we use is PrintFleet, which as served as an insightful and indispensable tool for our team for years. To learn more about this DCA, read: An In-Depth Look at PrintFleet
5. Strategic Planning with Our Sales Team
After you’ve submitted the deal onto our Print Partner Portal, Your Green Office Partner sales representative will call you within one business day to communicate about the opportunity and get an agreement on how to make the intro.
The planning process for the introduction can be as thorough or as simple as you’d like.
For small deals, the planning process is often as simple as crafting an email, CC’ing your sales rep and the prospect, and leaving the rest to us.
But especially when it comes to large deals that could yield tens of thousands of dollars in profit for our MSP partner, the partner often wants to give us any edge they can to win the deal.
One way to improve the odds of success is to explain our value proposition to the client.
Buying copiers is not exciting for the vast majority of your clients. But improved bottom line, automated and time-saving workflows, and enhanced security are sure to pique some interest from any top-level decision-maker.
Also, your clients love a cohesive service structure. Mention the collaboration between their MSP and their print vendor with support requests, and you should have their full attention.
But while a brief glowing testimonial can go a long way, we don’t expect you to sell us to them.
We have trained sales professionals to communicate our services to clients. They are the ones who will handle the sale, you just need to get them ready to speak with our team.
In the call between you and our sales representative, we will be able to uncover your priorities and the level of involvement you’d prefer in this partnership.
6. Make the Introduction!
Last but certainly not least, introduce Green Office Partner to your client.
This is where you pass the torch to us. Get us in front of your prospect, and we take the wheel from there.
Our goal is for the introduction process to be as quick and painless as possible.
We’ve been doing this long enough to know that MSP owners don’t have the bandwidth to dedicate hours of time to pitching print services. You already have enough on your plate.
To make the introduction, all you need to do is send an email to both your Green Office Partner sales rep and your prospect. Here’s an example:
“I’d like to introduce you to [sales representative with Green Office Partner. They are our preferred print vendor. I let them know that you guys are possibly looking for a change in your print environment. I will let you guys take it from here.”
It is that simple. No further legwork required.
Print Partner and New Deals
We’d like to thank you for taking the initiative to invest time in Print Partner.
Our priority has always been to serve our MSP partners and provide exceptional support for you and your customers.
When you refer prospects to Print Partner, you are not only making your MSP’s job easier, but you are also protecting your business from competition while increasing your revenue! Your MSP, Print Partner, and your clients will all reap the benefits of our referral program - win, win win.
If the prospect has the potential to spend $500 or more on their monthly print services and solutions, we will send you your $250 in commission, plus an additional $250 should you send us a copy of their current print agreement prior to the introduction.
Once we close the deal, you’ll receive your additional commission of $1,000 per copier sold, plus 5% on their lifetime print allotment with us. We call this mailbox money - many of our MSP partners get monthly checks long, long after they’ve submitted their deal.
And while there is no definitive way to introduce us to your partners, we hope this article has given you some ideas about where to start.
The truth is, introducing is easy because our value proposition is easy to understand.
Every mid-sized to enterprise business wants what we offer them - cost control, optimized and automated workflows, security, and a cohesive service structure. These are universal values!
If you pitch our relationship with just that paragraph, you’ve done your job as our partner. Any technical or more specific questions will be handled by our team post-introduction.
If you’d like to start referring new deals to build additional wealth for your business, then consider partnering with us, a Print Partner you can trust.
