Printing & Imaging Blog

As marketing visionary and Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt used to tell his students, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”

They’re useful words to live by as the printing industry transitions to managed print services and on-demand printing, two trends that point out how end users increasingly look for ways to complete important tasks with as little intervention on their part as possible.

The words of Levitt (who’s also credited with popularizing the term “globalization”) live on for Robin Wessel, director of product marketing for desktop products at Xerox. “It’s the output that customers need, not necessarily the devices” that create it, he says.

His recommendation for how solution providers can apply this logic to sales calls is to look at how and where pages are being generated. That could be everything from high-profile workgroup printers to stealthier backroom copiers and desktop inkjets.

Locating all of these document creation end points can strike gold. “That’s how you’ll find opportunities to provide value and improvements in the customer’s cost of ownership,” he adds.