Get managed print services clients by offering one thing: a print assessment of every printer and copier in an office, with a written monthly cost. Take it to the people who feel the mess, which means office managers, practice administrators and IT leads at firms with 20 to 200 employees, and ask when each lease or service contract ends. The assessment gets you in the door, and the contract end date tells you when to call back.

This page covers who buys, what to put in an assessment, six ways to find offices that need one, a worked example for a made-up dealer, and the emails that get a reply from someone who has never thought about print on purpose.

Who buys and what they are comparing

Nobody wakes up wanting managed print. The buyer has a pile of small annoyances: five brands of printer, toner ordered on a company card, a repair tech who comes when called, and a copier lease that renews itself. Often the person who handles it is an office manager or an IT generalist who has three other jobs.

They compare you with what they have, not with another dealer. So your pitch is a clear before and after: one invoice, one number to call, supplies that arrive before they run out, and a reduction in devices that nobody uses.

Security gives IT a second reason to care. The Federal Trade Commission's guide, Copier Data Security: A Guide for Businesses, says the hard drive in a digital copier stores data about the documents it copies, prints, scans, faxes or emails. It tells businesses to evaluate encryption and overwriting when they buy or lease, and to check that the lease or purchase agreement says who handles the hard drive at the end of the machine's life. Those are questions a managed print dealer can answer in writing, and most offices have never asked them.

What goes into the assessment

  1. A device list: make, model, age, location and monthly page count where the machine reports it.
  2. What the office pays now: toner or ink, repairs, lease or rental, and the staff time spent ordering and fixing.
  3. Contract dates for every leased machine, written down so you can call back.
  4. A short security check against the FTC's guide: encryption, overwrite settings, a password that is not the default, and what the lease says about the drive.
  5. A proposal with a monthly price per page or per device, and the number of devices you would remove.

Keep it to two pages. The buyer should be able to hold it up in a meeting.

Six places to find offices that need it

Lease and contract dates

Ask in every conversation: "When does your copier lease end?" Put the answer in a spreadsheet with a reminder six months before. Offices rarely look at the date themselves, and it is the cleanest reason to talk.

Vertical lists

Law offices, medical practices, accounting firms, schools, engineering firms and title companies print a lot and handle private records. Pick one and learn its habits. A dealer who says "I work with eight dental offices in the county" gets more replies than one who says "all businesses".

IT companies and MSPs

Managed IT firms know every printer they have been asked to fix, and most would rather not. Offer them a referral arrangement so they send you the print work. See how IT companies find their own clients to understand what they are busy with.

Office park walks

Park in a business park, walk in with the one-page assessment and ask the receptionist who handles the printers. Ten stops in a morning get you three names and one conversation. Dull, but it gets you names that no list has.

Existing customers' other sites

A client with one office usually has a second location, a related company, or a friend who owns a similar firm. Ask for each at the end of the first quarter of service.

Targeted email to office managers

Build a list of 150 firms by industry and employee count, find the office manager or operations lead, and send a short note offering the assessment. The next section shows one.

A worked month for a made-up dealer

Say Brightline Document Solutions in Omaha sells and services copiers. The owner picks accounting and law firms with 15 to 60 staff and decides to book six assessments in a month.

  • He builds a list of 140 firms, 70 of each type, with a name for the office manager or managing partner.
  • He sends 25 emails a day for 5 days, then two follow-ups a week apart.
  • Say 12 reply, 7 book a walk-through, and 6 let him in to count devices.
  • At Harlan Reed Accounting, he finds 11 devices from four makers, a copier lease ending in March, and about $1,100 a month in toner, repair calls and lease payments combined. His proposal replaces them with 6 devices at one monthly price below that total.

Those counts are invented to show the arithmetic. What he can count on is that the lease date goes in the sheet, whoever says no today.

The first email

Subject: Printers at Harlan Reed Accounting

Hi Priya, who looks after the printers and copiers at the office? I do print assessments for accounting firms: I list every device, what the office pays for toner, repairs and leases, and when each contract ends. You get the report either way, with no commitment to buy. It takes about 40 minutes on site. Would a morning next week work?

Tom, Brightline Document Solutions, 902 Dodge St, Omaha. Reply "stop" and I won't write again.

Include a postal address and an unsubscribe line, since the FTC's CAN-SPAM rules require both for commercial email. A call works too: ask "who handles the copier lease?" and write down the answer and the date.

What to stop doing

  • Quoting a price per page before you have seen the devices. The assessment is the product.
  • Sending brochures about speed and features. Office managers care about fewer calls to fix things.
  • Skipping the security question because it feels technical. It gives IT a reason to say yes.
  • Forgetting a "no" with a lease date attached. That is a future yes.

If you do the list building and email yourself, expect a few hours a week. Rocketship can handle that side: describe the kind of firm and the number of employees in plain words, and it finds the office managers, reads each firm's website, emails from your own Gmail and follows up, then books the walk-through on your calendar. It sends on its own unless you switch on "show me first". Plans start at $12 a month for Starter, and pricing lists what each includes, with lead generation software for small business explaining how the credits work.