01732 759725 48 a critical requirement. Solutions such as PaperCut and Printix play a key role here, offering flexible, cloud-native and vendor-agnostic print management that supports multi-device environments while enhancing security and visibility. For document management, DocuWare and OptimiDoc are popular choices, as both enable data capture from multiple sources and help automate and streamline customer workflows. Q: If you could change one aspect of your job, what would it be and why? A: I’m passionate about developing solutions and matching the right technology to the right challenges. If I could change anything, it would be having more time to further raise our profile, build brand awareness, and ensure more customers are aware of the value we can offer. Q: How do you spend your week – time on phone, face to face meetings with customers etc.? A: Recently, I’ve been focused on onboarding suppliers and gaining a deeper understanding of the different value-adds our new partners bring to our offering. Alongside this, we’re actively working to enhance our company profile and brand awareness through increased engagement activities. We’re planning a sales kick-off day in January, sponsored by Brother, which will be a fun telemarketing event with spot prizes designed to drive early momentum. From there, I’ll be working closely with our telesales team to generate more appointments for audits. Looking ahead, my focus will be on continued telephone and in-person outreach, webinars, and other customer engagement initiatives to further raise awareness and create new opportunities. Q: What would make your job easier? A: Greater visibility in the market would make it easier to start conversations with new customers, improve engagement rates, and build trust before we even make contact – creating more opportunities and accelerating momentum in the managed print space. https://officexpress.co.uk Q: Which OEMs do you partner with and why? A: We work with Ricoh, Canon, Develop, HP, Brother, Epson, Kyocera, and are soon to sign with RISO. As a truly vendor-agnostic provider, we don’t need to fit a customer’s requirements into a single vendor’s solution. Instead, we create bespoke solutions tailored to their needs. This flexibility is central to our approach, as we are focused on solutions-led sales rather than hardware-centric sales. Q: What are your customers most interested in currently? A: Cost savings, efficiency and security - customers want a return on investment not just in financial terms, but also through improved efficiency, productivity and security across their workflows. We help them rethink how they work by looking beyond print to document management and workflow optimisation. To support this, we offer free technology audits that assess existing workflows and ways of working to identify opportunities for improvement. Our broad portfolio of OEM and ISV partners enables us to offer a wide range of solutions tailored to different needs and budgets. Q: How have you changed/are you changing business operations to exploit new opportunities? A: Our technology audit offering and vendor-agnostic approach are central to this. By focusing on solutions-led conversations rather than devicespecific sales, we can better adapt to customer needs and deliver genuine, measurable value. Q: When selling MFPs, what are the most popular software solutions you provide and why? A: For Canon customers, uniFLOW remains the most widely adopted solution, largely due to its advanced security features and microsegmentation capabilities, making it well suited to zero trust environments. As more organisations move toward cloud-based infrastructures, secure cloud print management is becoming Q: What do you see as the biggest challenges facing channel businesses today? A: The biggest challenge today isn’t delivering great service or retaining customers – it’s getting in front of new ones in the first place. When we provide the right device and solution, backed by excellent service, customer relationships tend to take care of themselves. The real difficulty in today’s climate is finding prospects, cutting through the noise, and getting customers to engage in meaningful conversations with us. OfficeXpress recently acquired Ergo Computing, a well-established MSP with a strong track record in the education sector, successfully supporting a wide portfolio of schools. My role is to build on that foundation by extending our success into the managed print space. One of the challenges we face is that customers are retaining their technology for longer, increasing the importance of early engagement. As a result, our focus is on raising awareness of our print offerings – while we are well recognised as an MSP, we are still building visibility for our managed print capabilities. Dean Birks, MPS & Digital Transformation Specialist, OfficeXpress View from the channel Q&A Dean Birks
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