Monday, May 11, 2009

If I ran Ricoh or HP and had to respond to the Color Cube . . .

If I Ran The Zoo (1977) Dr Seuss Softcover
I would take a Printernet approach.

1. Identify anyone, anywhere on any of your teams with VAR DNA. They could be living in MPS or in PSP or corporate HR or PR.

2. Then get them all in group, either live or on the web, but organized by contiguous local areas.

3. Create a list and later a database of every customer who touches your global in those contiguous local areas.

4. Counter attack by getting all the VARs - wherever they live - to mount a co-ordinated selling of mPs - managing all the PRINT services - to anyone who lives in an enterprise.

Then . . .
The PSP can sell Commercial Print + MFP + mPs.
The MPS can sell MFP + mPs + Commerical Print.
It's all customer focused, not silo organized. The blablabla is all about the customer, not the box.

Meanwhile the VARs can focus on combining boxes and software for new offerings for old customers; customized versioned print instead of textbooks and yearbooks, transinfo customized print that gets information, instead of giving information, printernet publishing for newspapers and governments.

The very hard part is figuring out the incentives and the comp. But that's above my pay grade. I'll leave that the Board of Directors and the CEOs.

3 comments:

  1. Perhaps I missed something. Isn't this Xerox's response to the Edgeline?

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  2. Not as far as I could see, but maybe I missed it. What I'm looking for is an integration of PSPs and MPS and MFP people. All facing the customer at the same time.

    From what I can see Xerox,my first investment, has at least three silos that don't co-ordinate their efforts. One engages in the production print space, another engages in the MPS space at the top of the pyramid and the other focuses on selling boxes and now is bringing MPS to the bottom of the pyramid.

    I'm suggesting that a much more productive approach is a process of reorganizing the internal interactions so that people from various silos would all focus on one customer. The name of the game is manage all the print products by building ties to the print 4 pay sector.

    For example, if you're selling a school district, sell the boxes to streamlines administration AND improve the educational process AND doing student and faculty publications. tying all print products together. The admin report, the school newspaper, the yearbook and postcards with pUrls and SMS to parents to improve attendance.

    All with numerous entry points but similar interfaces and processes. The notion of anyone prints anything anywhere at any time is at the heart of the printernet idea.

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  3. Max,
    Just a little more.
    I don't follow HP that closely until they get into the commercial print space, so if anyone tried this approach I haven't seen it.

    Consider that most commercial printers work with non profits. Every non profit needs really smart MPS. But they don't trust anyone, don't monetize staff time, and are much too busy being busy to hear anything new. But, if a commercial printer has a trust based relationship with a non profit, wouldn't it make sense to leverage that relationship to sell MPS for the enterprise. I think this should work both ways to cross sell to everyone's advantage.

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