Print Partner Blog

What Sets Print Partner Apart

Written by Alec Slovenec | Dec 2, 2022 9:18:53 PM

When prospecting for new business opportunities, you’re looking for anything that sets you apart from the competition. With so many competing MSPs with nearly identical service suites, you’d want any edge you can get.

Print Partner is here to give you a leg up on the rest of your MSP peers. When you partner with us, we supplement your IT service suite with our nationwide award-winning managed print services for your clients from our parent company, Green Office Partner.

We want to make you look good for your clients. Think of us as your print wingman.

In this article, we’ll explain how our approach to managed print services makes us a uniquely effective partner for working with MSPs and helping you win over more clients.

Providing Print Solutions, No Headache Required

Printers get a terrible reputation in the technology space. Nobody wants to think about them, deal with them, or service them.

But despite a unanimous unspoken disdain for printers, everybody needs to print!

Pairing your MSP’s IT support with a partner’s managed print services (MPS) is a way to unload the burden of print off of your clients. When your clients sign on with a third-party MPS vendor, the vendor will start actively managing your clients’ print for them.

From toner replenishment to device performance monitoring to preventative maintenance, managed print services can offer tremendous value and long-term savings to your client.

If you are not currently partnering with a print provider, and you aren’t offering print in-house, you may be falling behind your competitors.

The line between MSP and managed print is blurring more by the day, with many print vendors adding IT support to their service suite and vice-versa. 

But transforming your MSP into a print provider is not an overnight job, and can be an expensive and exhausting process for your entire staff.

While there are other print vendors offering to partner with MSPs, most expect MSPs to sell their services for them. This is an issue, since most MSPs focus the majority of their labor on service, not sales. Marketing and sales budgets are tight.

When you work with Print Partner, you’re able to offer a print solution to your prospects without changing anything about your current business model. 

Partnering with us enables you to expand your service suite without lifting a finger, since once you make the introduction, we take 100% ownership of the sale (and everything that happens post-sale).

This positions you as your client’s technology advisor, handling their IT while connecting them to a print provider. This added value gives you an edge over many of your competitors.

And once you refer your client to us, we’ll handle the rest. No need to teach print management to your staff, which likely already has a full plate.

Now that you know Print Partner handles the entire print sales process, we’ll give you the details on how we deliver our print proposal.

The Print Assessment

When meeting with a prospect, you educate them on all of the services your MSP provides, and what sets you apart from the competition. 

So here’s what sets our sales team apart from the competition: our print assessment.

One of the main points that sets us apart from other print vendors is our in-depth print assessment: a thorough, collaborative discovery process between the print vendor and the client.

For many businesses, our visit may be the first time they’ve had a print assessment. And often, the assessment is long overdue.

Our parent company, Green Office Partner, performs thorough assessments for medium to large-sized clients. Here’s how it works:

  • We establish your prospect’s print goals. What do they want to get out of their print? Are they looking to save money? Maximize efficiency? Are they going green and just want to reduce their carbon footprint? This will help guide our assessment process.

  • We study your client’s floor plan and perform an in-person walkthrough to fully understand your client’s print needs.

  • We review your client’s current machines across all of their locations, testing their efficiency and performance levels.

  • We review current print agreements and invoices to get the “big picture” of what your client is currently paying for print. We’ll provide our findings to them as a TCO (total cost of ownership) and review our data with them to ensure that we miss nothing.
  • Finally, based on their goals and our findings, we’ll provide them with a proposal, outlining what they’re currently paying for print and what they could be paying with us. We’ll review if any machines need replacement and if new machines need to be purchased.

    We pride ourselves on taking print assessments to the next level, inspecting every nook and cranny of your client’s printing needs.

The next time you're prospecting a client, ask them when the last time a professional thoroughly reviewed their print infrastructure. You’d be surprised how many have never received an accurate print assessment, and how many desperately need one.

If you’re interested in learning more about our print assessments, read: What is a Print Assessment?

After the sale, Print Partner will have complete ownership of your client’s printing needs, and when necessary, we will collaborate with your MSP on support requests.

Collaborative Print Support

Ask your prospect another key probing question: what’s the worst part of your current print service provider?

Chances are, you’ll hit some serious pain points with this inquiry, and they’ll complain to you about support requests.

Technical difficulties often put clients at their lowest point in their print service. For businesses that heavily rely on a large print volume, device downtime can cost them hundreds to thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

If support requests are not handled promptly, print vendor-client relationships can be irreversibly damaged.

At Print Partner, we take support requests very seriously. When a client reaches out for assistance, we create a ticket for them and immediately begin working on the issue.

In some cases, your client may reach out to your MSP for support, since their print devices and IT network are interconnected. When this happens, we will work with your MSP directly. 

We will never make your client call back and forth between us and your MSP since this only creates stress and lengthens the support request time.

We strive for first call resolution whenever possible.

Print Partner, your MSP, and your client are all on the same page: when repairs are needed, we want them to be taken care of as soon as possible. If you’re looking for that extra spice in your sales pitch, consider working with Print Partner. We’ll back you up 100% of the way.

If you'd like to learn more about the differences between Print Partner and other vendors, read: 4 Reasons Why Print Partner Stands Out Among Other Print Vendors

We collaborate with hundreds of MSPs across the country to deliver exceptional managed print services to their client base. 

We want your clients to be excited when you tell them that you have solutions to their IT service and their print service. BOOM. Two birds, one stone.

Plus, we’ll pay you! 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.

So consider partnering with us, a Print Partner you can trust.