PRINTITRESELLER.UK 25 “This is not just a conversation about our programme, it’s a conversation about what can you do to ensure that you have maximum value for your business with the maximum recurring revenues possible - because the more recurring revenue, the higher your multiple will be when you come to exit,” he said. Don’t leave money on the table Given all the changes that are happening in the print industry, Jones says that resellers need to make sure they are staying relevant to their key customers and in full partnership mode with them, and that they don’t leave money on the table. “What I mean by that is Brother also has other devices in its portfolio, like our specialised printing solutions and our labelling devices. These are other things that they can be selling. A good example of this is we had one large customer enterprise who has also deployed our labelling devices in their warehouses, and we have a single application that allows them to manage the whole fleet.” Jones adds that print is still a huge market with billions of pages printed every year. “Resellers are either looking for a new revenue stream or contractually securing what they already have, and our partner recruitment programme is really an outcome of all of those things. Everybody understands that this will not be a growing market, and it will slowly decline given the generational changes within workplaces. However, print is not dead – it’s declining, but it definitely is not dead. “Our strategy is to work with partners to make sure that they’re maximising value with every customer that they have right now, and that they’re not leaving money on the table. That is how they will optimise their value on exit,” he concluded. www.brother.co.uk out from what we could describe as low-touch dealers i.e. ones with their own service and support infrastructure. They are great salespeople but don’t necessarily have the back-end infrastructure to do everything when it comes to managed print services. “We call these high-touch partners, and we have a team here whose job it is to support them, helping them with portal familiarisation, with contracts and managing their contracts with Brother effectively. We also have an end-user team that can help them go and win business, one of the team will go with them to a customer site to talk about a walk-in take over agreement for example.” Maximising business value He continued: “There’s going to have to be some challenging conversations between resellers and their customers. The question is where are we in that conversation, and where are our partners? “Brother is a channel-centric company and what we do is provide our partners with a comprehensive product portfolio to meet diverse customer needs. So, if they feel they have a customer at risk, they have an alternative and an opportunity to mitigate some of the uncertainty that they are facing around their future. “This recruitment drive isn’t about us saying: we have a channel partner programme, and we can give you x% rebate on x sales and some marketing development funds. This is a much more material conversation, which has potentially far-reaching consequences for the channel and for the business valuations of these channel partners in their future.” Jones points out that at some point a dealer principal will be looking to sell and will want to ensure they get maximum value for their business. support from Brother and on-site demonstrations. MPS Enterprise is the vendor’s fully bespoke offering for resellers servicing large corporates with complex printing needs spanning multiple locations. Benefits include specialist pre-sales consultancy for customers and ongoing optimisation of the service through a dedicated Brother account manager. “Notably, 100% of the ink and toner cartridges can be returned for recycling or remanufactured at our recycling technology centre in Ruabon, North Wales, meaning that zero waste goes to landfill and with our MPS offering we provide full data on recycling and remanufacturing to support companies’ reporting on sustainability – it’s a full turnkey end-to-end solution,” Jones explained. Balanced deployment Brother advocates balanced deployment – looking at where people are printing, how they are printing and what their needs are in this new, digitised world. “That approach provides the information needed to remove or redeploy devices into spaces where they are most needed and make the print infrastructure more practical for people,” he added. Jones argues that the channel needs to steer those conversations with their customers. He continued: “This recruitment drive is going really well - we’ve signed up 29 new partners already – so what we’re saying is obviously landing well within the OA community. “Rather than avoiding the issue that they have a big device in-situ and they’re worried they will lose a customer, because they haven’t got an alternative to offer, what we’re discovering is that partners are interested in talking to us about how our offering can enable them to open up the conversation about how they can help customers to navigate the changes in work practices and the resultant technology impacts.” Channel support Brother has an active partner base that sells transactionally. It sells 1000s of printers every month. The vendor is the number one brand in SoHo laser printing and in the SMB sector it is the number two brand. Jones said: “What we’ve realised on this journey is that there are a number of OA dealers that are effectively spun INTERVIEW
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