As part of our “Partnering for Excellence Best Practice Sharing” interview series, I sat down with Mike Parmet, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Parmetech.
Parmetech, a Pennsylvania based, Xerox Document Technology Partner (DTP) have been very successful with their approach to selling Xerox Managed Print Services (MPS), so naturally I wanted to find out more. Here is the video interview and you can read the transcript below the video.
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We’ve been talking a lot about your success with MPS (Managed Print Services) over the last few years. Give me a little idea about some of the things that you’ve done to win these large opportunities.
MP
Okay, so we recognized that we had to figure out, what is our niche? What can we pick up as a tactical or strategic advantage over our competition? To boil it down, in a nutshell, the secret sauce for us was recognizing that we had to help customers optimize their environments.
We’ve walked into so many situations where we see customers with too much “large equipment”, big A3 devices, and while we are happy to provide those devices, we know that in many cases the customers don’t need to have nearly the A3 footprint that they have.
The other key was convincing customers to do what we call an open strategy approach to evaluating their environment. Don’t go out and ask three or four vendors to “Give me a price for 50 of these, 50 of those”, but rather, “Assess our environment and come back with your recommendations”.
We banked on the fact that our large competitors and large OEMs would go in for a like-for-like strategy to try to just replace large A3 with other large A3 devices. In the large wins that we’ve had, we were able to show the clients how to reduce their A3 footprint by 60-70 percent if not more. So that has been the secret to our success.
TG
So saving them money essentially, but that’s not where your engagement stopped with them, you had some value-add to that (on top of the box) right?
MP
Correct. For many of our clients, their experience with us was their first experience in true MPS to manage their whole environment. So we wanted to show them that they could do things beyond just having the cost per page and fleet management. We showed them software solutions such as Equitrac and Pharos which would enable them to really manage their cost by users, figure out what people were printing, how to drive print policies that could reduce the amount of printing that they are doing.
TG
Smart printing?
MP
Exactly. In other cases, we’ve asked clients “What sort of problems are you having? How can we help you solve a problem? And, for a large retail manufacturer we’ve helped them solve a printing problem where they needed to customize forms for their large retailers that they were shipping product for. They wanted custom invoices and we showed them a solution that made that very easy to do, enabling them to expand their e-commerce market.
TG
So now that you’ve implemented some of these solutions do you find that you have a stronger, tighter relationship, better stickiness with those customers?
MP
What we’ve found with our best customers that first showed the trust in us to evaluate their environment and select us; they are coming back to us with more [inquiries]. “How else can you help us?” they are actually asking us the questions.
So along the document management continuum where we start with the image on paper we say to them we can go any direction you want to. If you want to go to retention of older document versus optimizing future workflows to a digital format we can take it both ways.
TG
Sounds like you can’t solve their problems unless you are asking the right questions and it sounds like you’ve asked them a lot of questions. Well, I really appreciate you joining us today, thanks for the insight and keep up the good work.
MP
Thankyou.
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