Elise McFarlane
With summer over and the conference season in full swing, many of us are going to be out and about traveling to conferences and dealer meetings, often seeing familiar faces and familiar industry solutions, services, and hardware providers—companies that by nature of their longevity in the business have become somewhat ubiquitous. But that doesn’t mean their message is any less relevant plus there’s always something new going on or a fresh perspective to share with long-time customers and prospects as well as those of us who cover the channel.
With that in mind I spoke with Elise McFarlane, Marketing Manager for PrintFleet about why it’s still important for them to maintain a high profile at industry events, the message PrintFleet presents to visitors as well as what’s new and exciting.
How many industry conferences and dealer/reseller events does PrintFleet attend each year?
McFarlane: Anywhere from 20 to 30 events across our customer base in both the traditional BTA channel and the VAR channel, which is new for us.
Why the VAR channel?
McFarlane: We’ve been dancing round the VAR channel for almost four years now and some of our customers are leaning towards that space. This is the year for us to get that channel up and running. Our LINK solution enables customers to outsource a number of solutions from us and our partners, allowing them to add to their service offerings without having to offer full managed print services.
PrintFleet is fairly well known, why spend so much time at events that cater to existing customers?
McFarlane: We are spending less time at traditional industry shows and more time at customer events so we can really focus on supporting our customers going forward. Industry shows tend to be events that we sometimes just have to attend so we aren’t conspicuously absent and don’t leave our partners wondering where we are. With our new emphasis on the VAR channel, though, we’re looking to attend more events in that space to increase sales and brand awareness.
What are some of these VAR channel events?
McFarlane: We’re heading to IT Nation in November. It’s a ConnectWise event, but it’s much bigger than ConnectWise, drawing a large crowd of technology solution providers from across the globe. That will mark our official launch into the VAR channel.
What’s the primary message you hope to get across at these events?
McFarlane: At industry events we’re mostly concerned with brand awareness, but at customer events we are able to focus more on program specifics and working together. It’s at these types of events that we’re looking for growth within our existing customer accounts by getting still more of their devices connected. Connected devices offer cost savings and new revenue opportunities for our partners.
VAR events represent new business for us and we approach these events with a concentration on education; the role the VAR might play in our MPS marketplace is our focus. We want to be the solution of choice for VARs entering the print space. They don’t have to offer complete managed print services, but anything involving monitoring devices is something we want to be involved in.
What kind of questions do you typically get from existing customers at these events?
McFarlane: Customers usually want to know what we’re up to, so we’ll get the usual “What’s new?”
We have to know in advance what we are looking to promote at each event we attend, from both a commercial and technical standpoint, so we check in on our roadmap before every show.
Other questions we typically get include “How do you compare with so and so,” “Do you offer DCA security,” “Do you offer hosting,” and “Can you ‘integrate’ with X?” It is important that our focus at the event answers these sorts of questions.
I would imagine VARs have a different line of questioning?
McFarlane: Their questions typically focus on what PrintFleet does, particularly what PrintFleet can do for VARs; “Who are you? What do you do? How can we do it? Can you integrate with X?”
What kind of questions do dealers and resellers who aren’t doing business with you typically have?
McFarlane: Dealers and resellers usually want to know about pricing, how our solutions work, if our DCAs (Data Collection Agents) will stay ‘up’ more frequently, and the types of support we provide.
When someone switches to PrintFleet after using another product, why do you think they make that switch?
McFarlane: Customers typically come to PrintFleet because of our data; we have worked to make it the most accurate, reliable data in the industry so that our partners and customers can make informed business decisions and manage their customers accordingly. Unfortunately it is not as simple as just getting data from devices. We have therefore make a significant investment in what we refer to as conditioning of the data by way of various algorithms to assure that the data represents actionable information.
Our support is another major factor that prompts customers to make the switch. Every direct customer of PrintFleet has access to our CARE team, technical support, marketing and, if necessary, development.
What’s the biggest misconception customers and non-customers have about PrintFleet?
McFarlane: The biggest misconception appears to be our price. Given the results of our latest market research, we are confident that we are priced very competitively. Historically PrintFleet did not have an economic model that was well suited to the mid-size dealer. Our PrintFleet Enterprise solution and per device fees, along with the technical resources a dealer required to maximize the value of their investment, represented a significant amount of money. Today our Vision™ offering at $0.35 /device/month is priced very competitively for full service device monitoring and hosting. In addition to the competitive pricing, customers can be assured of the accuracy of our data. Resellers will not be wasting money or [generating] inaccurate invoices or incorrect toner orders, for example. It is often a misperception that the information from the device is always reliable and can be used. We on the other hand know that this is not always the case so as a consequence we have spent much of the last 36 months developing proprietary algorithms that condition the data to make it actionable.
What one or two things might your existing customers and even non-customers be surprised to hear about PrintFleet?
McFarlane: I think our existing customers might be surprised to hear how we can truly automate the supply chain. We have had a number of announcements recently about all of the partners that they can choose from for automating supplies without having to be on their traditional MPS programs. We are looking forward to these programs launching in the next couple months.
Considering there are other options on the market for dealers and resellers, how do you differentiate PrintFleet from the pack?
McFarlane: It comes down to support and data accuracy. Our LINK platform is also unique because of our data accuracy, allowing different data points to go to different partners and opening the supply chain to more people, including dealers/resellers, distributors and even service partners. Additionally for global or multinational businesses we are one of the truly international options. With partners using our solution in over 100 countries and offices in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Canada we can effectively meet the needs of such businesses.
Let’s talk a little bit about what’s going on with PrintFleet in 2015, what’s new and exciting?
McFarlane: A lot has happened in 2015 and we also have a lot to look forward to. Accessibility is a key component of our desire to connect customers and partners, which is why our solutions are now available in Brazilian Portuguese, German, Japanese, French, Korean, and English. We’ve also been expanding our network of LINK supply and service providers; Katun is now a global LINK partner and ACM Technologies has become a LINK partner in North America to name a couple.
This past year we continued our trend of double-digit growth. We’ve targeted 20-30 percent growth in the upcoming year.
On the technical side, we’re also providing remote management of our DCAs—that’s very big.
You’ve also announced XOA-e and are focusing on Internet of Printers, tell us more about that?
McFarlane: XOA-e is our embedded DCA for Samsung devices – it will open up a lot of doors to the SMB where people have tended to not install DCAs due to the perceived costs associated with managing them. We are very excited about our new DCA capabilities and remote management as well as having it embedded on a device. We are looking forward to more capabilities from our DCA in the future, in particular we want it to be “smarter”, gathering at any point in time only information the partner requires.
The potential of the Internet of Printers is to connect businesses with supply and service providers using device data. We feel that people often forget that print is one of the sectors where you actually can have everything connected through the internet. For us, IoP has led to our LINK Supplies Fulfilment solution where a device can order its own toner. What happens is an alert or other notification will go straight through to an EDI order to your preferred distribution partner. Once the dealer sets the device up they can kind of set it and forget it for consumables, and it’s truly connected through the IoP to many distribution partners, effectively streamlining and automating the supply chain.
What trends are having the biggest impact on the business and how are you responding to those trends?
McFarlane: The Internet of Things, connectivity, the importance of data—that’s our mainstay. We have always focused on the data and security. Because we only gather device data, we are very compliant with regulations such as the EU Data Protection Directive and North American data protection laws. We also work hard to ensure there is encryption and multiple levels of security on all the data we collect.
What can we expect to hear from PrintFleet between now and the end of the year?
McFarlane: In the upcoming months you’ll be hearing more about XOA-e, we’ll be adding more LINK partners to our growing network of distributors and service providers, and you’ll see an increase in remote management of DCAs.
