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Editor’s note: The following article originally appeared in the September, 2013 issue of ENX magazine. I thought it was worth sharing again in case you missed it the first time. You’ll also find many more articles I’ve written there over the years.)
How often do you hear or use the word solutions? Probably every day, right? Your customers may not use the term, but it’s a buzzword that most of us in the office technology industry can’t get away from whether we like it or not. And when we talk about solutions, we’re mostly talking software.
My original intent was to focus only on new solutions that office technology dealers are selling successfully. What I discovered was that there was far less excitement about brand, spanking new solutions and more excitement about tried and true solutions that customers have a defined need for. In addition to discussing their hottest selling solutions, many dealers were kind enough to share their strategies for marketing those solutions.
At Systel Communications in Fayetteville, NC, the number one solution sales reps are moving these days is NSi’s Autostore. “It is by far the leader in the business for middleware integration,” states Lew Watson, senior account manager. “NSi is top shelf, provides great support, and the value add is an important piece.”
The strategy for selling NSi’s AutoStore at Systel isn’t radically different from selling anything else. “It comes down to true selling where you can go into an account and distinguish yourself by uncovering that workflow solution that nobody else has uncovered and you’ve added value to the account with the transaction,” explains Watson.
At Applied Imaging in Grand Rapids, MI, the one solution that resonates most with customers is Canon uniFLOW, a print and scan management solution. “We really got serious about it after our software guys went to a Canon seminar on the program the early part of this year,” reports John Lowery, president of Applied Imaging. “They came back and were well versed in making a presentation.”
uniFLOW with its many modules is just the ticket for Applied Imaging’s customers. Because of uniFLOW, Applied Imaging doesn’t have to piece together a separate document output management program with a separate cost accounting program to solve a customer’s problem. “uniFLOW offers a lot of the modules so you can buy one solution,” says Lowery. “That’s less expensive than if you were to piece everything together.”
Although some sales reps shy away from software and solutions by nature, Lowery says his reps are fired up about selling uniFLOW. “It works well with customers who have different MFPs and many single-function devices, or if they’ve got a big fleet of machines to deploy, or the machines are in many different locations.”
Brian Sampietro, CIO of TGI Office Automation in Brooklyn, NY, has found any solution having to do with document routing from MFPs is scorching hot. Specifically, he’s talking about software like Drivve Image, NSi AutoStore, and eCopy.
“Users can walk up and scan documents into their folder structures on their server or route them to specific people via e-mail in a more efficient way than scan-to-email or the preprogrammed folder structure that people used in the past.”
TGI’s customers are also gravitating towards PaperCut for print accounting, cost recovery, and job control. “They’re able to lower their total cost of ownership of their devices by routing documents to more efficient MFPs where they can get secure release and print confidential documents and can run reports so they can see what’s being printed and who’s printing, allowing them to better control costs,” adds Sampietro.
The reason TGI has been more successful selling these solutions of late is a commitment to training. “It starts with arming your reps with the right talk track and internal and external support to speak intelligently about solutions and how it can impact an organization’s business,” says TGI President Frank Grasso. “We just talk about it more.”
The solutions TGI sells aren’t necessarily resonating with specific verticals, but tend to be popular in all sorts of businesses. “Customers everywhere are trying to do more with less, especially since 2008,” notes Sampietro. “They’re reducing staff and trying to make processes more efficient. Where they could devote 15 minutes to find a file to answer a customer’s question, now they want to retrieve those documents in under a minute.”
At EO Johnson, an office technology dealership with offices across the state of Wisconsin, Dan Rickert, solution sales manager, has seen a lot of traction with document management and workflow process solutions with advanced capture. He’s also seen a lot of interest for cost accounting solutions and solutions for securing devices such as HID proximity cards and PIN codes as well as solutions that enable secure print release.
Three of the top solutions sold by EO Johnson include Square9’s SmartSearch, uniFLOW, and PaperCut.
EO Johnson has a separate sales division that works off referrals and leads from its general territory reps. Besides Rickert, three additional sales reps cover the company’s various locations while 10 specialists handle implementation on the backend.
Typically, EO Johnson reps don’t walk in the door and start talking about a specific product. “We take a consultative approach,” explains Rickert. “We find out what the customer needs and based on that need we steer them towards a product. We try to get away from ‘Here’s our product and this is why you should buy it.’”
He’s found that customers in all types of industries are interested in document management solutions. “It’s everywhere, there’s no specific industry or vertical we can narrow in on as to where we’re having the most success,” says Rickert.
Meanwhile, cost accounting, secure print release, and device security solutions have been embraced by verticals like education, healthcare and insurance. “Organizations that either have budget constraints or the need for more security,” states Rickert.
Copier Fax Business Technologies in Buffalo, NY is rebranding the dealership as a solutions provider rather than a technology provider in response to the business becoming less hardware centric and more solutions centric. The new brand, Documentelligence is the focus while the two most popular solutions moving out their door are DocuWare and PageScope Enterprise Suite, Konica Minolta’s secure print program.
DocuWare has received a lot of interest from the medical industry, especially with the latest initiatives related to electronic medical records. “Getting a DMS in place is mission critical for them and DocuWare does the trick as far as interfacing with their programs, and the strength and power of DocuWare is unbelievable,” says Al Scibetta, owner.
DocuWare is also popular with Scibetta’s manufacturing clients.
Jason Habbal, vice president and sales manager with Vision Office Systems in Charlotte, NC, reports Square9’s Smart Search is an ideal solution for larger clients while for low-end applications, NSi AutoStore is going strong.
NSi AutoStore has been a great solution for Vision Office Systems too primarily because of NSi has relationship with Ricoh and because Habbal finds it an economical solution. Square9’s SmartSearch represents Vision’s high-rend document management solution. “While being on the high end of the price scale for what we offer, SmartSearch does so much to give people a complete document management system from the archiving and indexing to the retrieval,” notes Habbal. “There’s lots of things automated within it which makes it a nice solution for anybody looking to take their documents digitally.”
One of the things that drew Vision to SmartSearch was the program’s ease of use. “If it’s easy to use sales people find it easier to sell,” states Habbal.
A new solution that Habbal has high hopes for is Virtual Works’ ViaWorks, a solution that he describes as the middle ground between a full-blown document management system and not having anything. “The product is great, our IT manager likes it, we just haven’t done a lot with it yet,” says Habbal. “It’s a search engine for files, it has a data mining piece, and finds the files you’re looking for; it’s not for indexing and things like that, just searching for the files you have in digital format. It’s a nice middle piece.”
LDI in Jericho, NY is a solutions selling powerhouse and has been successful with a number of different software solutions. “The Nuance Suite featuring eCopy has been our de facto standard for document distribution,” reports Brian Gertler, vice president. “Equitrac, Copitrak and Sepialine have shared the limelight for job accounting and cost recovery. Nuance’s PDF Pro and Omnipage still represent our industry’s best desktop replacement and cost competitor to Adobe Acrobat.”
LDI is also doing well with MaxxVault and Convergent EDM for scalable document management while EFI, CGS, Creo and Onyx are their go-to sources for color management suites.
LDI is doing well on the solutions front where prime opportunities often reside in mid-to-large size businesses, especially those that recognize value over cost.
“In a world that is saturated with very proficient MFPs, our ability to integrate the workflow and software applications are the differentiators that allow us to give our clients a competitive edge,” states Gertler.
Although LDI spends significant time and dollars training and certifying their account representatives and account managers in the strategic solutions in their portfolio, they always seek to involve their Professional Services team when placing a solution. “This way there is greater proficiency in the pre-sale engagement and continuity through the installation and implementation process,” concludes Gertler.
With so many solutions available to the dealer community, it’s refreshing to see that both old and new solutions continue to secure a prominent place in many dealers’ solutions portfolios.
