“You are not competing with a robot. You are competing with a dealer that sells one.”
This month, something a bit different. Robots. Specifically, selling robots. More specifically, selling against robots. Have I got your attention now?
First things first. This is not about smart AI voices on the phone, automated emails, or cool AI-generated copier videos. Selling against robots here means machines that move in the real world. They lift. They navigate warehouses, service departments, and cube farms on their own.
This is not science fiction. Not “The Terminator” or Will Smith running around in “I, Robot.” These are wheels, trays, carts, and floor jacks. No robot is going to cold call your contact at the auto dealership, conduct a needs assessment, run the site survey, build a proposal, and demo a duplexer.
That is not the competition.
The competition is the copier dealer across town that now sells autonomous mobile robots (AMR). Sure, their show floor has A3 devices, wide-format printers, and MFPs like always, but today, there is a delivery robot rolling through, stacked with toner boxes and Starbucks, heading back to the service desk, after a quick drop-off in contracts.
In the field, salespeople not only quote first-copy-out times but also pitch a 40% labor cost reduction and fewer long walks from the dock to the front office. No heavy boxes. Not headcount cuts. Just safer material handling, reduced strain, and happier employees.
Imagine one of your long-term accounts. The hospital you know by floor or tire distributor that always takes your call. Solid. Then small signals show up. Fewer returned calls. Shrugs at your dealer-sponsored tech show. Eyes glaze at “document management” slide fifty thousand and one. Curious and concerned, you ask what is on their technology whiteboard for next year. The answer is a simple word. Robots. The context, heart-stopping. “Yeah, Emily from ‘Fred’s Copiers & Kombucha’ popped in and dropped off a flyer. She’s been trying to get in the door here for years. Did you know they sell robots now, too?”
HUH?
I know. You’re thinking to yourself, “Greg, aren’t we all twisted up right now over artificial intelligence, not robots in HR?”
“Au contraire, mon capitaine.”
The autonomous robots are here. Now. Today.
There are dealers performing assessments, site surveys, getting floorplans and forwarding delivery and acceptance (D&A) documents to lease companies and getting paid, not just for the latest hot-shot A3/A4s, but for fleets of output devices and AMRs, under one agreement.
Prospects respond to what they can see—you know this. A cart shuttles mail between floors without bumping into a wall and the room gets quiet. On real floors, AMRs deliver parts and samples. They wait at the doors, call the elevators, and ping a desk on arrival. Nobody asks about DPI. They ask if it talks.
Meanwhile, your copier sits in the corner with its amber LED blinking.
Great. You’re just starting to learn how to write up a step-lease, you’ve finally figured out how to trail close, and now you’ve got to worry about robots in your customers’ offices. Yes. Robots are not going to get their own budget. Robots are going to steal from the copier budget.
Forget for a second you’re competing against a copier dealer selling robots into your accounts, dragging along a few printers, a copier, and two new fax machines.
Competition is competition. Here are a few ways to deal with robots.
Three copier-centric plays that work with new tech, not against it:
- Co-own the decision, keep print central. Sit with the customer and draft a one-page movement brief that compares “copier only” versus “copier + delivery robot” environment. Keep the focus away from your copies as you work within the new workflows, not against them.
- Map the floor around your MFPs. Document human runs tied to your installed devices: where forms, labels, and packets originate, how often they move, who carries them, and where they land. For robotics specifically, mark drop points at printers. This shows what a robot would carry and what still requires print, scan, and release. The robot moves items. The copier remains in the workflow. This applies to any change in business workflows, digital and human-based.
- Show your stack works with the new tech. For example, offer to create labels and barcodes for totes, delivery tickets, secure print release drop locations, scan-on-arrival to update ERP/EMR, and whoever watches jobs while a cart is en route.
- Field note: While you run these plays, study office-ready robots and the labor problems they target. Use that research to uncover pain points you have not logged yet: repetitive runs, heavy lifts, and missed handoffs. Align your service, forms, and print workflows to those problems.
The industry has seen waves like this before. Standalone copiers connected to the network. Color slid in. A4 took shelf space. Managed print nudged margins. Today, a rolling device shares the cycle, yet month-end still arrives.
It may be a while before you run into a competitive robot/copier deal, but it is coming. In the meantime, stay tuned to the real examples, keep your mind open, and as the selling professional I know that you are, use AI to learn as much as you can about this emerging category – office-ready robots.
Greg Walters
is an entrepreneur and founder of the notorious destination site TheDeathOfTheCopier, where he comments on all things imaging, the rise of managed services and the advance of business technology. A prolific writer and frequent speaker, Greg shares his passionate, unique – and often provocative – view of technology and people, addressing the impact of digital on 21st century business. His 2014 book, Death Of The Copier, offers a controversial summary of the early days of Managed Print Services and the not-so-distant future of the hard copy industry. Reach out to Greg at greg@grwalters.com.