Do you believe equipment vendors want to steal your customers by selling their wares to Corporate America? When a vendor arrives to service your equipment, do you think they are really on a covert mission to retrieve your client list? If you do, then you suffer from what I affectionately call Printer’s Paranoia.

Printer’s Paranoia starts very innocently. You start believing all your sales people are lazy and cheat on their expense reports. Then while on vacation, you spend most of your time convinced that no one back at the plant is working. Next you’re up all night worrying that the IRS is lying in wait to uncover rebate money stashed under your mattress. The final phase finds you throwing down tequila shots at your local pub, mumbling aloud to yourself about how great the good old days were and how your equipment vendor is trying to steal your clients.

According to Psychology Today Paranoia, is defined as follows:

par-a-noi-a
1. An omnipresent sense of distrust and unjustified suspicion that yields persistent misinterpretation of other’s of persecution with or without grandeur, often strenuously defended with apparent logic and reason
2. An unwarranted tendency to interpret the actions of other people as deliberately threatening


Xerox Takes Most of the Heat
When Xerox created the Docutech no one could have anticipated the vast impact this single product would have on the printing industry. Printers worldwide have built successful companies around the Docutech and related high-end products that followed.

Despite all of this, many printers still believe that Xerox is a competitive threat because they sell equipment and facility management services to Corporate America. Printers falsely believe this work would otherwise be routed to local printing organizations, but is instead kept within the bowels of corporate Xerox. The belief is that Xerox profits from these operations, while printers take it in the shorts.
.
This is all paranoia. The only thing Xerox is actually guilty of is not doing a very good job of explaining away this perception. This whole issue has been incorrectly turned into an us versus them battle with the potential to get worse as Hewlett-Packard has recently jumped in to further fan the flames of paranoia against Xerox.

Let’s put a stop to all of this nonsense.
The reason many printers are so irate about this issue is because they have not spent the time to examine the facts. Xerox’s facility management operations have filled a segment of the market that commercial printers themselves could not, and frankly should not serve. A great portion of this work is so time and budget sensitive that printers would go broke trying to service this business. If Xerox shut down their facility management operations, Corporate America would not take this work and push it back out to the local printing community. The facility management business model shows that for this specific type of work, corporations should keep the printing in-house.

Most large corporations are excellent at outsourcing. When it makes economic sense, corporations outsource judiciously and without prejudice. Corporate America will purchase facility management services or digital presses for one reason - it makes good business sense.

All equipment manufacturers sell to your competitors.
I grasp that printers would prefer to purchase equipment from companies that do not sell to anyone but them. But let's get back to Planet Reality. Every major equipment manufacturer (except printer friendly HP Indigo, see my last column) does or will sell printing devices to anyone who can be legally bound to a purchase order.

Up and down the halls of Corporate America you can find various types of printing devices made by companies like Agfa, Canon, Heidelberg, Hewlett-Packard, Konica, Xerox and the list goes on. It has been this way for decades and the faster printers stop making this an issue, the better off and more successful they are going to be.

Lets use absurdity to make this clear. If you still believe that vendors who sell to Corporate America are a competitive threat then you must consider halting all purchases from every company who sells to the printing industry. That’s right. These folks sell equipment to your competition and NO ONE takes more work away from you than other printers.

Believing that there is some white knight vendor out there who only sells to you, is like dreaming that the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs will play each other in a future World Series.

The truth is that when one of your vendors sells equipment to your direct competitor or Corporate America, it actually benefits most printing companies. The more companies that standardize on similar devices, the easier it becomes for print buyers to work with and support commercial printers.

Equipment vendors are not blameless.
Without question, some equipment manufacturers must share the blame for creating Printer Paranoia. When printers hear a vendor's CEO deliver one message while their executive management team delivers another, it is easy to understand why printers are so worried. Manufacturers must be sensitive to these issues while balancing what is best for their company. Manufacturers should be consistent and open about their strategy. This will lead to a trusting relationship between printers and manufacturers.

Yes Virginia, some equipment manufacturer’s sales reps have used their partnerships to go after the printer's clients. Vendors should remember that you don’t build trust by dumping the date that brought you to the dance.

Equipment vendors need printing companies as partners. Continued arrogance and indifference must become a part of the past.

----

Printers need to get over their fears and paranoia and expect equipment manufacturers to sell to Corporate America. Let competitors be paranoid while you face reality and grow your business. Focus your commercial printing organization on being one of the few companies leading the shift to digital printing, VDP and 1to1 marketing.