01732 759725 48 Q&A change that will allow us to bid at that level of business, so we’re now talking to much bigger schools and companies. In the past we were just focused on the ‘S’ in SME, and we’re now having success with the ‘Ms’ and larger corporates. In a typical month we sell about 150 devices – at one point that would have been 100 customers, whereas now it’s 25 customers. We also used to heavily focus on selling refurbished kit, whereas now with Epson technology having eightyear warranties, instead of going to a customer and saying, ‘here’s a refurbished device that you don’t have any prior knowledge of’, we can say ‘pay a little bit more and have brand new Epson kit’. Then at the end of the five-year contract, we put it back with them for another three years, knowing that there’s still a warranty in play. So, it’s kind of like reversing the circular economy. Q: When selling MFPs, what are the most popular software solutions you provide and why? A: There’s a real push on cloud solutions right now and we are also seeing a spike in document management solutions; we’re getting some good traction on things like Foldr. Q: If you could change one aspect of your job, what would it be and why? A: We have offices all over the UK, and it’s a challenge to be present in all locations every single week. I’d love to have everyone based in Leeds, but it wouldn’t work! Q: How do you spend your week – time on phone, face to face meetings with customers etc.? A: I spend my week going between the offices, making sure things run smoothly. But I still sell when I need to, and help the sales team out with larger tender opportunities. I also spend time building relationships so that I can build a pipeline for future acquisitions. Q: What would make your job easier? A: A helicopter. other than it just being a device that puts a mark on a piece of paper. 95% of what we sell is Epson, but we do also need laser devices, because Epson devices don’t fit every single scenario. Our second choice OEM is Ricoh, we offer their office equipment, as well as their production devices, which, are in my opinion, the best in the industry, we also work with Kyocera. Q: What are your customers most interested in currently? A: Customers are looking for a wellpriced solution that either saves them money upfront or delivers another benefit, such as savings across the contract term, or, as is the case with Epson, lower energy bills and reduced CO2 emissions. Everybody is trying to save money, our main focus is around sustainability, but when it comes to the crunch, it will influence a decision to some extent, but it won’t be the one thing that seals the deal. Ultimately it still comes down to pounds, shillings and pence. You just have to look at a tender and you will always see that the weighting is always heaviest around pricing. The exception to that is when we’ve engaged with a customer early and we’ve been able to influence a tender, that’s when you’ll see a change. We’ve had scenarios where we’ve visited a school and when they released their tender it stipulated that they want pricing for inkjet, which really helps us as a business, because in this marketplace, there’s only RISO and Epson that do an inkjet solution. Q: How have you changed/are you changing business operations to exploit new opportunities? A: If you go back and look at our business 10 years ago compared to now, it’s completely different. Historically, we did one and two machine deals. Our aim is to get to £30 million, and to do that, we’d have to sell a lot of single opportunity deals! So, we’ve spent the last three years building relationships with bigger companies and really working to understand why and from whom they buy. We’ve implemented Q: What do you see as the biggest challenges facing channel businesses today? A: If you’re in a competitive scenario, it seems like it’s always a race to the bottom to win new business or retain existing business. I think the trick that other resellers are missing is to focus on the added benefit – why should the customer choose you or why should they remain with you? Where we’re winning is with Epson, which gives us the ability to save customers money on things that aren’t directly related to photocopiers – that’s a huge thing. Cloud is another challenge at the minute, particularly around educating customers on true cloud solutions and the difference between public and private cloud. Security is another hot topic, and increasingly we’re having to prove our credentials on quite a lot of tenders. Q: Which OEMs do you partner with and why? A: We are Epson’s No.1 reseller in the UK, and we lead with heat-free technology because it’s different. Our salespeople have something else to talk about Richard Taylor, Managing Director, XBM and Office Odyssey View from the channel Richard Taylor
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