I took these videos at BTA East last week. It was my first attempt and I know I need to get better. Some had lighting issues, another was the sound and another was me with not setting the camera at hi res. I apologize for the no9t so good video's. However these for the most part are from P4P Hotel Sponsors.
Listen closely, turn up the volume and I promise new video's will be much better.
I took these videos at BTA East last week. It was my first attempt and I know I need to get better. Some had lighting issues, another was the sound and another was me with not setting the camera at hi res. I apologize for the no9t so good video's. However these for the most part are from P4P Hotel Sponsors.
Listen closely, turn up the volume and I promise new video's will be much better.
Private Equity backed entities are still on shopping sprees in the Imaging Channel. These buy-up groups don't appear to be slowing down as they continue gathering up independent dealers along with their declining print volumes. We are also seeing some disastrous turnouts in the aftermarket supplies business, the latest collapse LMI, just a year ago for some seemed a well thought out investment.
A lesson for the Imaging Channel and its investors is being taught and let's hope not ignored as we watch the recent outcome involving LMI. A tragedy we could say concludes that Managed Print Services is not the promise many still believe it to be. Something I have been preaching for the last five years.
So, what happened between August 2018 - August 2019?
This recent conclusion to LMI's hopes was indeed not what they or their investors were hoping. What can the industry learn from this failure? To help answer that question here's a few questions, I would ask of investors
What was of interest in an organization which was losing massive amounts of revenue? LMI was said to have had revenues of nearly 120 million at its height just three to four years ago. According to court documents, regarding their receivership, LMI's 2019 revenues were expected to be around 20 million.
What caused this massive 100-million-dollar decline? Surely, the loss of one account Xerox could not have been the only reason for the decrease in revenue. If so, why invest in an organization which was unable to collect a more extensive customer base over the last decade?
LMI was described as an expert in the infrastructure of Managed Print Services, and in 2018 the investors sited the growth potential of Managed Print Services and LMI being the leading provider in the Managed Print Services, infrastructure (tools, resources, and solutions) as factors for their investment.
Here's a link to the press release issued in 2018.
https://www.prnewswire.com/new...tions-300700837.html
These questions may sound harsh. However, I believe their answers should alarm the channel and its investors to the realities of investing in the myths of Managed Print Services. We must have more scrutiny on what appears to be questionable, especially in declining markets.
Managed Print Services is not additional revenue for the industry. It is reclassified existing revenue. I hear a lot of folks describing the glory of Managed Print Services as a reason they invest in this industry. Some are waking up to the Managed Print Service fantasy, and I predict more will wake up soon.
HERE'S MY LOUD WARNING "IT IS TIME FOR ALL OF THE IMAGING CHANNEL'S ACTORS TO BALANCE HOPE WITH THE MARKET'S REALITY"
The facts are print equipment, its supplies, and its service needs are reducing in demand everyday. This decline has repercussions for all with aspirations of growth through acquisitions without a strategy to change the game. Sooner than later, the end buyers of the roll-ups are going to disappear. The question I continue asking is this. Who is the buyer after Private Equity? What's the end game? I have added a new question, will the collapse of LMI, and the struggles of others cause future Private Equity to just say no? I imagine in the remanufacturing sector it might be hard finding Private Equity investment interest now.
The investments in the Imaging Channel should be an investment in change. This doubling down on yesterday is getting very disasters. I don't think the industry's investors want to watch their investments become assets sales.
Let's invest in changing the game.
The investments in the industry must be a strategy to capitalize on the decline, causing a shift to selling based on market realities. Invest in customer-centric deliverables, and challenge the status quo, invest in changing leasing models to subscription models, invest in the 85% of the market which is oversold by outdated sales models, invest in e-commerce platforms, invest in new leadership from outside the channel with different mindsets to help existing leaders navigate through the intersection between the digital and physical worlds.
Dealers must consider what we see in the supply industry as a warning and take the notice seriously. Nothing will challenge the industry's leaders more than competing with an innovator who decided to deliver a customer-centric model built around the realities of the market, not its fantasies. The best people to create that model are the current actors but only with an open mind to new ideas and must include new human capital from the digital world. I hope the industry doesn't allow these lessons to go un-noticed.
In Closing: The Imaging Channel needs more people willing to discuss the realities of our market openly and candidly. The channel's obsession with whitewashing anything negative is adding to their troubles and keeping them from exploring what could be based on what should be.
"Status Quo is the killer of all that will be invented."
Ray Stasieczko
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“So, get to know your customers. Humanize them. Humanize yourself. It’s worth it.”
Kristin Smaby
Take care of your customers or someone else will! How many times have you heard that one? Yet, how many times do we fail at taking care of our customers in the way they want to be taken care of?
How well is your sales team taking care of your customers?
Successful leaders know in order to grow sales you must take care of your customers. You must make a lasting impact on them. I have to ask... what's the impression your team is making on your customers? Would you even know?
Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. Yet far too often, we forget just how important they are until it becomes too late.
You and your team may think you're taking care of your customers, but in reality, are your actions measuring up to your intentions? Right now, at this very moment - would you even have a clue as to how anyone on your team is taking care of your customers?
I'm concerned as to how many leaders are clueless as to how their team is taking care of their customers.
“Merely satisfying customers will not be enough to earn their loyalty. Instead, they must experience exceptional service worthy of their repeat business and referral. Understand the factors that drive this customer revolution.”
Rick Tate
Let that quote sink in for a moment, now ask yourself - Are my salespeople enhancing or neglecting the customer experience?
Are your sales reps growing your competitor's next great customer?
How well can you answer the following...
With the utmost of honesty, sit down and visualize your sales team as you read out loud:
Now, what are you personally doing to help coach your team to enhance the customer experience? If you find this hard to answer then I submit to you right now, you're fostering a babysitting culture.
Stop treating your customers as customers.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, a customer is someone who buys goods or services from a store or business. The word client can also mean customer but it has a separate definition as someone who receives professional services.
In a business context, the two terms are often applied differently based on the types of relationships built. Customers are generally people who come to you mainly to buy products or services you supply. Clients buy your advice and solutions personalized to their particular needs.
Do you and your team personally view your customers as customers or are they viewed as clients? How many inside your team view them as clients but treat them as customers?
Would you even know?
Are Your Salespeople Enhancing Or Neglecting The Customer Experience?
Would you know when a customer becomes a client, or the other way around? When a client becomes a customer this becomes a problem.
Are you building customers or are you building clients?
Think about this one for a moment... How are your sales reps being viewed? Are they viewed as sales reps of products and services or do they enlighten, add value, inform, advise, counsel, nurture and become an advocate on behalf of your clients?
Is it your personal preference to be sold or served? When you’re in the marketplace as a consumer do you seek out professionals whom you can trust or sleaze-balls selling you and then moving on?
Your personal commitment should be to coach your team to build sustainable relationships with your clients who value their professional advice rather than finding customers who make a one-time purchase.
If you and your team fail to keep your clients as such, they could turn into customers
Hug, strengthen, protect and serve your clients. How many of your sales reps are putting a big huge hug around your client base? What are they doing to ensure your clients continue doing business with your company?
Are your clients being well-served and taken care of? The more your sales reps can lead with a servant mindset the better off you'll be in the long run. The aim is for them to be seen as a trusted adviser.
To serve, this sets an entirely different standard and experience. Your clients are human beings and not pieces of equipment. In a personal relationship, the human and heartfelt aspect is of the utmost importance. I'm going to ask you and your team to do the same with your client relationships.
Serving is warm. Servicing is cold. Servicing is a defensive move while to serve is an offensive move.
A servant experience means:
Creating an outstanding experience is one of the biggest opportunities your team will have to capture your clients' interest, get them to act and have them continue to do business with you.
Your team must stop operating with the same mindset, delivering the same HO-HUM experiences as you expect different outcomes.
What could you be doing to give your clients the experience they deserve? What can your team be doing to give your clients the experience they deserve? There’s absolutely no excuse for ignoring this fact. I encourage you to start curating client memories. If you're not providing outstanding experiences, then really, what are you doing?
I understand, I get where you all are coming from. Every day, I walk in your shoes. I am fully committed to helping your sales team integrate social aspects and modern strategies into your current sales process to grow new business. I want you to get results. This is why I am passionate about doing this the right way, the genuine way, the authentic way! It's about understanding value before visibility.
Selling From the Heart is making a difference! I poured my heart into every page of this book and I think you're going to love it. You can find it on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. You can click on the book image below and this will take you to Amazon.
You can find more material inside Selling From The Heart.
In a world full of empty suits, I'm passionate about helping sales reps succeed by getting valuable before they get visible. I help sales teams understand the true value they bring to the market.
I appreciate getting the opportunity to share my stories. Integrating the use of social and sharing my story on LinkedIn was my “game-changer” in the highly competitive office technology world. With great pride I transform, challenge, coach and inspire sales teams to grow new business by helping them share their story and how they communicate it out by integrating the use of social inside the sales process. You can follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter and on my podcast by clicking on Selling from the Heart.
Contex, the world leader in large format scanning, today announces the success of its chat option on contex.com. Visitors praise the company’s popular feature, which has become a go-to resource for new customers and seasoned users alike.
Contex.com chat is one of the first opportunities that website visitors get to connect directly with Contex scanning experts, who field questions from the simple to the complex. The helpful resource has contributed to many first-time customers choosing Contex scanners for their specific requirements, and has also given many longtime customers valuable information to further boost their scanning workflows.
“Our online chat feature gives the scanning community a valuable resource for their scanner and workflow questions. New customers like the College Park Aviation Museum appreciate the helpful resource as they embark on their large format scanning initiatives,” comments Steve Blanken, General Manager, Contex Americas.
New and existing customers use the chat option to get immediate answers about scanner capabilities, such as how the IQ FLEX flatbed scanner handles delicate documents or textiles, for example. Visitors also inquire about the newest features of the HD Ultra X series.
The contex.com chat feature is staffed by Contex scanning experts Jerry Gautereaux and Paul Jones, and is available Monday through Friday, 9AM to 5PM Eastern.
Enjoy these most excellent threads from 5 years ago this week!
Enjoy these awesome threads from Ten years ago this week!
I'm doing all of copier industry x amount of years ago in advance. I only have 20% of my month left and I'm having a rough go this month. Got many peeps hanging out but can't get them to move or we're playing tag. I hate it when people ignore my emails and phone calls, just can't see why that happens. If you're busy tell me, if you don't like me then tell me, if you bought somewhere else then tell me. Don't leave me hanging because I didn't leave you hanging when you scheduled an appointment, needed a proposal or had questions 
Enjoy these awesome threads from 15 years ago this week!
Just a note for everyone, these specs are coming from a brochure that sourced on the web for Ricoh Asia Pacific. While the IM 550F has not been released in the United States I would expect that most if not all of the specs will be the same for the US market.
It seems there will be three models offered by Ricoh. The IM 550F, IM600F and the IM 600SRF. There was a note on the brochure that stated double feed detection is only available on the IM 600F and the IM 600SR.
So what is double feed detection and why is that important? It's my understand that double feed detection will prevent two or more sheets of paper passing into the document feeder at one time. The double feed detection ensure the accuracy of the document scanning process.
The IM 550F will print and copy up to 55 pages per minute and the IM600F and the IM 600SRF will print and copy up to 60 pages per minute. Kind of makes you wonder if the increase in MSRP is worth the extra 5 pages per minute. Brochure states the print resolution is 1200x1200
The standard configuration for all devices is one 100 sheet by-pass tray and one 500 sheet paper tray. Up to four additional 500 sheets paper trays can be added to the all of the devices for a total of 2,600 sheets of paper. 500x4 and 100x1 (by-pass). I'm not sold on these specs yet. I can see a picture of the device with four paper trays and the by-pass. I also saw that there are four additional paper trays available. The total of four would make more sense. I will try to track this down.
We know about the double feed detection for the document feeder in addition Ricoh offers a single pass document feed for all of the devices. Single pass means that if you scan a duplex (two sided) document both sides will be scanned in one pass. The benefit to the client is that the original documents will on make one pass through the document feeder, which means less chance of mis-feeds. Document Feeder will accommodate up to 100 originals.
The Ricoh IM 550F specs black scanning at 60 images per minute for simplex, color at 40 images per minute for simple. maximum resolution is 600 DPI, and compression methods are TIFF (MH, MR, MMR, JBIG2) grayscale JEG.
IM 600F and IM 600SRF duplex color scan speed at 62 images per minute and 100 images per minute for duplex black.
File Formats include single page TIFF, Multi Page TIFF, Single Page JPEG, Single Page PDF, Multi-Page PDF, Single Page High Compression PDF, Multi Page High Compression PDF, Single Page PDF-A and Multi Pages PDF-A. If you're not sure what PDF-A is you can visit here.
Standard scanning also includes scan2email, scan2folder, scan2USB and Scan2SD card. I've never seen or heard of anyone that's ever scanned or even printed from an SD card. If you have I would like to know what the application was for.
Really? Fax is standard, transmission speed is two seconds and standard memory is 4MB that can be expanded to 60MB.
Yay! The Ricoh IM 600SRF has a standard internal finisher/stapler. Offering a corner staple that can staple 50 sheets of letter and I'm assuming only 30 sheets of legal. I'm assuming the 30 sheets of legal because of previous specs for stapling with legal size paper. Finisher output capacity is 250 sheets.
Starter toner is included with the device! 10K for the IM 550F and 11K for the IM 600F and the IM600SRF. There is also a regular yield toner for 25,500 pages and a high yield for 40,000 pages.
Standard includes PCL5e, PCL 6, Postscript 3 (emulation), PDF Direct (emulation). Optional is the Genuine Adobe® Postscript®, XPS, IPDS, and PDF Direct Print from Adobe®.
RICOH Smart Device Connector, Apple Air Print™, Morpia, Google Cloud Print, and NFC.
All in all it's a good thing to have finisher/stapler in at least one of these devices. Stapling is a desired feature with A4's and Ricoh has not offered a stapler since the days of the SP5200.
There are additional specs for the device if you need them, you can access the brochure here.
-=Good Selling=-
As the print equipment and services industry continues declining it's time to evaluate all aspects of the deliverable. In the days of its growth it made sense for dealers to sell all the industry's equipment. However, today dealers should question that approach. Here are my thoughts on Production Print.
There seems to be a lot of talk regarding Production Print. However, if that talk turned into a discussion based on realities, most would listen with caution. The Imaging Channel is chasing this fantasy to the glories of production print, and too many get sucked into the vortex of what I describe as “production print’s pit of debt.” A debt rarely paid back to those who acquire it. Production Print is not a growth business model; it’s a displacement model. Many are buying into the noise without studying the data. Just because manufacturers are dumping R&D money into production print doesn’t mean your dealership should sacrifice its profits to join in.
If the channel were realistic in the market realities, there would be fewer players, and for some, the game would be rewarding. However, the game is being played by too many who don't play based on a knowledge of the game. Some of the players on the field are not aligned to win; they simply showed up to play a game they have no business playing.
“Never let the noise in the excitement of chasing revenues silence the cries to controlling cost.”
If the dealers really looked at the numbers and paid attention to all the cost associated with running a production print program, most would concede and abounded this money pit. Think about all the production machines spread around the demo rooms of those dealers who once had a grand vision of production print's success. Not to mention the obsolete parts, the extensive supply inventories, or production print technicians without enough placements, so they are fixing desktop printers. Now top that off with lowering print volumes. Many of these production placements are not the ideal account and extremely underutilized. Sales reps are placing production print equipment to capitalize on the lower service cost per page in order to increase hardware revenue.
Today there are too many manufacturers trying to chase after the king of production Xerox. Soon this king will buckle down and fight harder for their customers. When Carl Icahn decided to inject himself into the Xerox management, he made a few comments that should be noteworthy. The comments regarding the Global Imaging Group selling non-Xerox brand equipment is something the other manufacturers should take heed of. One day soon all the non-Xerox brand equipment placed in the past by, Global Imaging will revert back to, Xerox this will obviously include production print.
My prediction of HP buying Xerox also plays heavily into the production print arena. HP and Xerox share many customers, along with indisputable brand recognition. The indigo technology from HP would be a great asset to the Xerox production line up. Xerox has had an advantage for decades on production. Yes, they can be challenged by our friends at Konica, Canon, or Ricoh. However, dealers without the understanding of the market will find themselves selling production print as they sell walk-up A3's. These less sophisticated dealers will turn production print into a vendor auction. Sadly, in much of the market, this has already happened.
Dealers should re-think the production strategy. Those dealers less than 10 million in revenue should run from production. Focus instead on beating your competitors who are bogged down with 1990-2000 sales mythologies. Figure out how to align with the market realities, stop chasing revenue with no regards to cost. I see dealers more excited about the trophies of production print then the profits from its placements. Let your competitor's lose money selling production while you deliver 85-90% of their customers a better experience with A4.
In March 2018, I wrote an article for ENX Magazine regarding Production Print. It was based on an analysis of nearly 5,400 Black and White units. Here’s a link to that article. https://www.enxmag.com/twii/mi...-not-marketing-hype/
Create Something Different Be an Entrepreneur and Change the Game
Start developing a strategy to change the way your customers’ lease equipment; change the way you allow customers to engage you aligning with a digital world. It's time to shed outdated parts of the deliverable which kill margin and are no longer relevant to the market's realities. My friends, it's time to change the whole game. It's time to win.
A Possible Solution to Exit Production Print’s Pit of Debt
It’s simple call up a competitor and sell them your base of production print. To motivate you into doing this. Take your production print and evaluate its actual cost to the organization. When you discover the negative numbers and truly understand how it’s weighing down your profits, you will then be ready to exit “Production Print’s Pit of Debt.”
Now that you’re ready to spin it off. Sell your production print business for the revenue it generated over the last twelve months. I am sure you can find a dealer in your market who would be happy to acquire your production base. Selling at revenue would give you a five times EBITDA at a 20% EBITDA, and in reality, If Dealers with a handful of units in the field put their production print business on a separate PnL, their EBITDA on that business would more than likely be around -5 to 5%. Provided you are accounting for all the cost appropriately and don’t forget to add in the depreciation cost of all the equipment in your demo rooms. Call my friends at NEXERA and have them help you evaluate your actual cost.
Getting out of production print for many dealers would result in an instant increase in overall profit. A handful of units in the market is simply not enough to offset the high cost of the deliverable. As a bonus you will finally get rid of those production units you walk by every day and see $$$$ littering your demo room floors.
Things to think about as the industry continues declining and mega dealers keep buying distribution. Those independent dealers left should fight the game to win as they grow. Let the private equity fight each other to grow their top lines. The future of the industry will prove painful to those who insist on chasing revenue and using outdated sales mythologies which are out of alignment with the realities of the market. As we are witnessing today with some of the industry’s actors who are watching their revenues evaporate, buried in debt fighting for survival, being the biggest doesn’t translate to being stable or profitable.
"Status Quo is the Killer of all that will be invented."
Ray Stasieczko
For more thoughts on the subject In March 2018, I wrote an article for ENX Magazine regarding Production Print. It was based on an analysis of nearly 5,400 Black and White units. Here’s a link to that article. https://www.enxmag.com/twii/mi...-not-marketing-hype/
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