After two weeks of travelling across the USA and meeting with a large number of partners, I thought it would be useful to share some of the key conclusions and observations from my recent trip.
One message was consistent across almost every market I visited: the long-term decline in print volumes and device numbers is here to stay.
While some regions are seeing short-term improvements as organisations encourage employees back into the office, the prevailing model appears to have settled at two to three days per week in the workplace. Naturally, this varies by industry, but the overall pattern is consistent.
This creates a significant challenge for partners. Most retain largely the same customer base and therefore require similar staffing levels and service infrastructures to support those customers. However, with lower print revenues, profitability is under increasing pressure, forcing organisations to find more efficient ways of operating.
Some businesses have responded by reducing the size of their sales teams, but I do not believe this is a sustainable long-term solution. Asking fewer account managers to support more customers inevitably results in less customer engagement, which over time can negatively impact both customer satisfaction and sales performance.
Despite these challenges, I was struck by how optimistic many businesses remain. Almost every partner talked about increasing market share to offset declining market volumes. Whilst this may seem a logical strategy, it is also clear that not every organisation can gain market share at the same time.
The most encouraging trend I observed was an increasing recognition that long-term success depends on delivering measurable customer value.
For most organisations, print represents less than 1% of total annual expenditure. However, when speaking with IT departments, print frequently ranks among their top ten areas of technology spend. As a result, print is often viewed as a necessary cost that consumes a disproportionate amount of budget simply to “keep the lights on”.
For the first time in my career, the business challenges facing customers appear remarkably similar across different markets. Organisations are dealing with:
Partners who can credibly address these challenges and help customers solve them will be best placed to succeed.
Within our own business, staff-related costs and property expenses account for more than 80% of our total expenditure. This pattern is reflected across many of the organisations we work with.
Many of our partners still view themselves primarily as Managed Print Services providers. This has served them well for many years and remains an important part of their identity. However, it can sometimes create a barrier when discussing wider operational and business challenges with customers.
This is where print data becomes incredibly powerful.
Over the last 12 months, we have worked closely with partners to analyse customer print data and uncover broader operational improvement opportunities. Examples include:
These examples represent only a small sample of the opportunities being uncovered across different industries. In almost every case, organisations also identified numerous internal processes suitable for transformation, ranging from employee onboarding and holiday requests to board pack distribution and compliance documentation.
It is true that digitising business processes often reduces print revenue. However, when viewed strategically, the opportunity is compelling. Solution and transformation revenue is typically five times greater than the print revenue lost, while also creating deeper customer relationships. The average Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution remains in place for more than ten years, making it significantly more resilient and valuable over time.
During my recent visits to partners across the United States, it became clear that the market is considerably more advanced in its approach to value-led selling and digital transformation.
Partners there have a relentless focus on helping customers improve operational outcomes. Given that acquiring a new customer can cost more than five times as much as retaining an existing one, and that repeat customers typically generate significantly higher lifetime revenue, the business case is compelling.
Although many organisations are still at the beginning of their transformation journey, several common success factors stood out:
The most successful organisations had built effective collaboration between their print and digital transformation teams. Rather than operating in separate silos, they worked within a single customer engagement strategy, supported by shared objectives and performance metrics.
In contrast, many organisations in the UK still operate with separate print and digital teams, limiting their ability to maximise customer opportunities.
Partners must place even greater emphasis on solutions and helping customers address the major challenges facing their organisations. This means demonstrating how their services can improve staff productivity, reduce operational costs and support customer acquisition and retention.
Print data provides a powerful source of business intelligence. The opportunity for partners is not simply to collect this data, but to interpret it, identify underlying issues and present meaningful recommendations to customers.
The partners that will succeed in the long term are those that integrate print and digital transformation into a single customer strategy. The sales conversation cannot end with the placement of a managed print service. Instead, the data generated by that service should become the catalyst for identifying broader operational improvements and transformation opportunities.
At Intuitive, we are investing heavily in making this transition easier for our partners. Our goal is to provide the tools, insights and automation capabilities that enable them to move beyond traditional print services and towards a more collaborative, value-driven approach to solution selling. Our Print Analytics solutions aim to deliver these important insights for partners.
Discover how Intuitive can help you uncover hidden customer challenges, open new digital transformation conversations and build more valuable, long-term relationships.
Ready to explore the opportunity? Talk to our team about turning print insights into measurable business value.
Be the first to receive Intuitive updates on new product announcements, sales, marketing and technical updates. Get an inside look at how our business is growing, and who knows, you might even find a special reward one day!
