We have a question for MSP owners: How many of your clients have regular contact with one of your direct competitors?
If you don’t have a reliable managed print services partner, the answer to that question is much higher than you might assume.
Let’s play with some simple math:
- Say you have 100 clients.
- Let’s estimate that 50% of those customers are using a managed print services vendor.
- Let’s conservatively estimate that 50% of those print vendors are also offering MSP services.
- That means that at least 25% of your client base has an active MSP routinely talking with the same decision-maker you are talking with.
And here’s the rub: It will be your largest customers who will have a managed print services (MPS) vendor operating in their space, as these are your clients with the most robust printing needs.
Do you really want your largest 25% of clients at risk?
While they may brand themselves as print vendors, many print service providers also provide managed IT services that directly compete with MSPs. The larger the print vendor, the higher the chance they are offering MSP services.
Your hard-won large customers and the trust you have established are certainly going to be questioned by the print vendor during their account reviews.
In this article, we’ll review how print vendors turned into MSPs, the threat they pose to your business, and how to protect your precious clients from getting poached.
MPS as MSP: A Brief History
If we look at the managed print services industry from 30 years ago, we’d see true “print vendors” - companies that focus on selling copiers and printers, while offering toner replenishment, equipment support, faxing/scanning solutions, and that’s about it.
If the service wasn’t directly related to paper, chances are, print vendors didn’t bother to offer it.
But the era of the “pure” print vendor has long passed. With the advent of the Internet and digital “paperless” documents, printers do not have the same selling power as they once did. And so, in addition to their print-related offerings, print vendors adapted to the market by offering IT services.
ENX Magazine’s Focus on IT Services
You can look at print-industry media coverage to see the shift in real time.
ENX Magazine has been covering the managed print community since the 1990s. In its earlier issues, ENX focused on copiers and support for print equipment, highlighting the optimal ways to sell these products.
However, as the years went on, ENX has shifted its focus less on print, and more on managed services.
Even as far back as 2013, ENX had titles in its magazines like, “Why Getting into Managed Services Doesn’t Have to be as Difficult as You Might Think.”
Since then, they have published countless pieces about how to enter the world of IT services.
Here’s just a handful of them:
Based on market demands, many print vendors have expanded beyond services traditionally associated with MPS. Rather than just replacing toner and fixing broken machines, print vendors have tacked on all kinds of additional services, many of which overlap with MSPs.
New IT Resources Available for Print Vendors
In ENX’s article from 2013, Mike Marusic, Executive for Sharp, claimed that it was more accessible than ever for MPS providers to dive into IT services.
“They (the MSPs) have a lot of skills and there’s a lot of third-party companies now that can help you make that transition and do a lot of the heavy lifting for them,” says Sharp. “A lot of that is doable because there are a lot of consultants, a lot of webinars.”
While we could all laugh at how terrible print vendors were at doing the job of an MSP back in the early 2010s, it’s a much different story now.
Since then, the resources available for MPS companies to “turn MSP” have become much more readily available.
There are now countless workshops to train and convert them into IT companies, many of which are advertised and shared in ENX Magazine and other publications related to print vendors.
How this Shift Hurts MSPs
With so many print vendors adopting managed services, the threat they pose to your MSP should be obvious.
If your clients work with print vendors offering IT support, those vendors will attempt to poach your clients away from you at their QBRs.
Based on what hundreds of our MSP partners have told us, we consistently hear that their largest customers are being approached by the print vendor.
If you don’t have a relationship with a trusted vendor who handles your clients’ print, you are leaving your hard-earned business wide open for the taking. MSPs can no longer afford to ignore print.
MSPs are, first and foremost, service organizations, meaning that the majority of your labor and resources are dedicated to providing the best service possible to your clients. Print vendors, on the other hand, are sales organizations, meaning that their focus is primarily on the acquisition of new customers.
So when they waltz into your client’s office for a hardware refresh, they’re going to poke around for pain points related to their IT service.
“How is your IT support? What do you have for BDR? You know that we also offer BDR, right? You know we can bundle it in with your print services, right? Let me walk you through our offerings…”
Even if you have rock-solid relationships with many of your clients, one pointed question asked to the right decision-maker could lead to a complete takeover of your account. Every single time your client has contact with their print vendor is another opportunity for them to swoop in and steal them.
It’s like the saying goes: “Don’t let the fox into the henhouse!”
To learn more about the threat print vendors pose for MSPs, read: The Greatest Threat to Your MSP Clients: Managed Print Providers
How to Protect Your Business from Random Print Vendors
So, how can you go about protecting your business from these random print vendors looking to poach your clients at QBRs?
You have two options. First, you can start offering managed print services to compete with print vendors, and completely take over both their IT and print environments. However, if you are like many other MSPs, you hate print, and want nothing to do with managing it in-house. For more on this phenomenon, read: 5 Reasons Why MSPs Hate Print
The other option is to partner with a managed print services provider you trust to not poach your clients, and refer your clients to them. This route is often the much more practical option for MSPs and is very easy to implement into your workflow without reallocating any of your resources to print.
To find a print vendor you trust, find one that does not offer services that compete with your own, and one with a referral program that rewards your collaboration. For more on this, read: Top Five Qualities for a Managed Print Services Vendor Who Works with MSPs
Once you have a partner, we suggest collecting and recording copies of all of your clients’ print agreements. Upload them onto your life cycle app or database, and set alerts to ping them six months prior to when their contract expires. These simply need to say something like, “How are things going with your current print vendor? Would you like to speak with our preferred print vendor?”
A light touch is all it takes to slowly transform your client space into a protected space free from the wandering eyes of random MPS vendors.
Print Partner’s Commitment to MSP Protection
Since our inception, Print Partner has remained committed to protecting our MSP partners from random print vendors operating in their client space.
We’ve seen first-hand how predatory print vendors can get with MSP clients.
That’s why we’ve positioned ourselves as the single national print vendor that is wholly-alligned with the needs of our MSP partners. Unlike most other print vendors these days, we do NOT offer services that compete with MSPs, (never will), and we protect you from print vendors that do.
Plus, we’ll pay you! For each deal we close, we’ll pay the person who registers the opportunity $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 what are you waiting for? Grow your income and protect your clients by working with us, a Print Partner you can trust.
