This month’s State of the Industry report provides a reprieve from some tiresome topics that have dominated the industry press, namely A3/A4, supply chain sagas, chip shortages, rising interest rates and inflation. Plus, it won’t be long until economists start sounding the recession alarm, and the term “stagflation” will be bandied about to denote high inflation and stagnant economic growth.
While dealers have never had a reason not to promote some of the more ancillary products, the aforementioned challenges hamstringing the most mainstream of products and services adds heft to the argument to add more focus on “hidden gems” in a dealer’s portfolio. So, in the “change of pace” spirit, we’ve compiled some examples of dealers spotting a need or pain point within a client’s organization—generally identified during a client review—and providing a solution that addressed the problem and, in most cases, exceeded the client’s expectations.
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Dealer: CPI Technologies
Springfield, Missouri
Client: Local school district
Solution: ViewSonic interactive white board
CPI Technologies
President and CEO Erik Crane takes pride in the knowledge that his dealership provides for the full range of products a typical business may need, with the possible exception of furniture. Interactive white boards (IWBs) and digital displays from manufacturers including ViewSonic and Samsung entered CPI’s catalog roughly seven years ago, and the dealer quickly saw several large installations at the onset before sales began to tail off.
Crane knew the IWBs would play well within the customer base, which included a healthy dosage of education clients, but adjustments were needed in the sales approach. A personnel change was accompanied by a commitment of the IT team to focus on emphasizing the dealer’s full catalog. That’s led to a rise in placements, beginning with a local, small school district installation.
“We had a smaller school district that we’d helped out with MFPs, but they were unhappy with another vendor they’d been buying their IWB displays from,” Crane remarked. “We did a little research and found out what we could provide that solved the customer’s pain points. Plus, we’d been looking for alternative revenue streams, as all copier dealers do, to make up the delta in machine revenues.
“It’s not really a high-margin product, but it solidifies us within an account. Plus, it can help open doors to accounts that we haven’t been able to crack before.”
– Erik Crane, CPI Technologies
As with other verticals, the education space is something of a close-knit community, according to Crane. With decision-makers frequently moving from one school district or college to another, their experiences with dealers often follow them to their next assignment. A good or bad experience and word of mouth go a long way toward a dealer’s ability to land new accounts.
Naturally, a thorough vetting of an OEM’s ancillary offering is critical to solidifying a dealer’s reputation. “Education is a tough job, and the last thing you want to do is make it harder because your technology doesn’t work,” he added. “We have a lot of large school district clients, and while the margins aren’t high, they bring references and open the door to other product placements such as MFPs. This tells prospects, ‘If we can take care of the largest school district in the state of Missouri, we can surely handle your school district as well.’”
CPI also has the advantage of longevity (founded in 1963) and has always boasted a significant presence in the education space. It’s quite familiar with the machinations of securing contracts and dealing with budgeting, politics and red tape.
IWBs and displays have other use cases beyond education, from restaurant signage/menus to self-ordering kiosks and other retail environments. Video walls comprising up to 16 monitors can be grouped to display a cohesive image. Both ViewSonic and Samsung also offer software with numerous applications that allow end-users to automate processes—check-ins/outs, way finding and other interactive features.
“All our mainline office tech reps talk about the full line of what we have to offer, and when they find a need for boards, they turn it over to the IT department,” Crane said. “The IT reps do the quoting and closing of the deal, and arrange delivery and installation. Commissions are split among the reps. We also have telemarketers finding opportunities, and our advertising includes information about displays. We use all means necessary to get the message out to the public.”
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Dealer: IMR Digital, a KDI Office Technology Company
West Hazleton, Pennsylvania
Client: Cayuga Centers (non-profit agency)
Solution: File conversion
IMR Digital provides cutting-edge document conversion and scanning technology at its 25,000-square-foot production facility. The conversion services enable clients to eliminate both the cost of expensive scanning equipment and the need for employees to perform the labor-intensive task of converting documents and microfilm into digital format. This allows them to perform more business-centric, high-value duties. Conversion customers are also able to free up valuable office space by minimizing the need for physical storage of documents.
In the case of Cayuga Centers, a non-profit agency that provides children and family services from its Auburn, New York, headquarters, the firm was grappling with an onerous volume of records—three million pages of secured physical documents that required tracking and maintaining. The client was also on the hook financially for insuring critical documents at each of their locations. The challenges in locating specific documents upon request made finding a more efficient solution a priority.
IMR Digital
According to Christopher Malatesta, senior sales executive for IMR Digital, this ongoing solution (phase one is slated for completion by November) entails storage, scanning, imaging and indexing services. One of the unsung heroes in the process is the system that allows Cayuga Centers to continue accessing files while the documents are housed at IMR Digital’s facility.
“While Cayuga Centers’ documents are securely residing with IMR and we’re scanning and indexing them, we provide the organization with our image-on-demand file retrieval service,” Malatesta said. “This service allows customers to submit unlimited requests via our website for any of their records. Our team retrieves what’s needed, digitizes it and sends the file back via secure file transfer within the same business day.”
Upon completion of the scanning and indexing, IMR Digital uploads the electronic records to DocuWare Cloud Storage and facilitates management of the data. The six months of secure document retrieval, in addition to the two-year conversion journey, is really a culmination of many months of onsite and online meetings with Cayuga Centers. Through listening, learning and understanding the agency’s many challenges and core values, Malatesta notes, IMR Digital was able to create a shared philosophy and approach to record retention.
IMR Digital’s growth strategy is centered on establishing a partnership with the client. Managing the client’s information paves the way to continuous engagement, creating the proverbial “sticky” relationship. One of the driving forces behind KDI’s 2019 acquisition of IMR was its depth of experience and competence in the specialization.
In-person, routine sales calls are also key to uncovering new opportunities by inquiring about visible filing cabinets in a client or prospect’s office.
– Christopher Malatesta, IMR Digital
“We draw on our vast experience of intimately understanding the struggles and pain points of existing customers,” Malatesta remarked. “This knowledge helps us open doors to potential new customers and begin conversations with similar business verticals. In-person, routine sales calls are also key to uncovering new opportunities by inquiring about visible filing cabinets in a client or prospect’s office. There’s much more efficient use of space and money. Pointing this out and sharing how our document conversion services can assist is the beginning of our conversation.”
Marketing is an effective tool here, with emails blasts, company blogs and social media posts that focus on conversion services providing an effective entry point for website inquiries. While virtually any business with multiple file cabinets can make for a conversation starter, government, health care, education, legal and insurance verticals are prime targets.
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Dealer: Advanced Imaging Solutions (AIS)
Las Vegas
Client: Local school district
Solution: Marketing-as-a-service
AIS
Marketing excellence has long been a driving force for the Sin City dealer, which has developed a highly effective content marketing strategy. Thus, it seemed a no-brainer to Keven Ellison, AIS’ vice president of marketing, that a marketing-as-a-service offering would provide a valuable asset for its customer base as well.
“We’re leading with a content strategy and can provide a complete range of marketing services,” he explained. “We find that this builds tighter relationships with our customers by helping them attract new customers through branding, content, digital marketing, strategy and planning, and even a marketing placement.”
By lowering costs and having a better insight in a customer’s business, this will provide more ‘listening’ to customer needs and more control in driving an overall marketing strategy.
– Keven Ellison, AIS
The genesis of a product or service proposition has traditionally taken root with one of the most powerful questions in a sales rep’s arsenal—the proverbial “What keeps you up at night?” This inquiry regarding business goals was posed to an AIS client in the education vertical. The response didn’t exactly speak to a solution that could be remedied with a hardware placement or software: the client needed a director of marketing.
Intrigued, AIS requested a copy of the client’s job description so that Ellison could help source a point person or perhaps provide some insight that could assist in the quest. “They were looking for a well-seasoned marketing professional who could do it all, but on a very meager budget,” he noted.
While the dealer didn’t have an HR repository of ready-to-hire, budget-level marketing professionals, Ellison proposed a viable alternative: AIS would hire and put in place its own marketing director (an AIS employee), fortified by the dealer’s marketing team. That enabled the client to remain within budgeting parameters and reap the full benefits of marketing support in an as-a-service vehicle. Ellison believes this innovative approach is one traditional advertising agencies should consider to build better relationships with their clients.
“By lowering costs and having a better insight in a customer’s business, this will provide more ‘listening’ to customer needs and more control in driving an overall marketing strategy,” he added.
In bringing relief to the education client, a new tool for AIS reps to draw upon was born. Now, rather than the sales team needing to understand the full extent of marketing nuances, they’ve been trained to identify opportunities and can spot instances of poor branding, new product offerings, and marketing complaints (leads, costs), then set up a meeting with AIS’ marketing department.
The benefits of not having to add a W2 marketing professional to the payroll, between salary and benefits, are compelling. “We’re now offering this to all our clients,” Ellison added. “We can customize a marketing strategy to meet their business goals.”
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Dealer: Pulse Technology
Schaumburg, Illinois
Client: Hammond Academy
Solution: LED wall
The measure of a great sales rep is the ability to take a seemingly small request and transform it into a large-scale solution that addresses the client’s needs. In the case of Pulse Technology, it involved dissuading a private school from outfitting its gymnasium with a projector that wouldn’t serve their purposes. In the process, Pulse was able to swap out some older technology in a well-rounded package deal.
Pulse Technology
LED products have fast become one of the top “hidden gems” that dovetail nicely with Pulse’s business model, according to President and CEO Chip Miceli. He sees opportunity for placements with MPS clients who have a need for LED signage, and the dealer offers solutions from Sharp and WatchFire.
“From our business model, it’s a great add-on, and we can sell service agreements in addition to products,” Miceli said. “Most of these products come with a parts warranty but not a service warranty. This fits well within our wheelhouse.”
Pulse Technology installed a 12×20’ LED wall on the stage in Hammond Academy’s gymnasium. During the discovery phase of the project, the dealer noted the school was using antiquated scoreboards. These were replaced with two LED walls, which provided not only the base functionality of displaying the scores and related statistics, but also opened the door to digital advertising.
Most of these products come with a parts warranty but not a service warranty. This fits well within our wheelhouse.
– Chip Miceli, Pulse Technology
Beyond swapping out older technology, the installations have increased the versatility of the space. Between the main LED wall and the twin scoreboards, the school can now use the gym as a multipurpose space for watching programming or performances.
“This service fits well with our other services, particularly IT,” Miceli noted. “Many of the functions of LED walls are computer-driven and rely on IT services. Our IT techs are the ones within our organization who go to the client site to provide service.”
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Dealer: Impact Networking
Lake Forest, Illinois
Client: Non-profit organization
Solution: Microsoft Power BI
Impact Networking is no stranger to machine learning projects. For years, under the umbrella of its digital innovation department, it assisted clients with extracting data from documents by training machine vision systems that could reinforce their learning over time. It expected, however, that there were many additional use cases for machine learning and AI that weren’t document-centric, and would soon need to be supported among its clients. More broadly, however, the dealer wanted to help clients become more data-driven, particularly those that sought to implement data governance and business intelligence tools in an enterprise fashion. With a dearth of talented data professionals in the marketplace, the need for staff with the talent to deploy and maintain an analytics platform has taken on greater significance in recent years.
Impact Networking
Fred Barrionuevo, the dealer’s emerging technology and AI team lead, notes his company desired to create a practice purely focused on data, the infrastructure behind it and other use cases for AI, going well beyond documents. Under his leadership, Impact quickly became certified as a Microsoft Gold Partner for Data and AI. Having garnered this experience, Impact was ready to support its clients. When one such client, which had relied on the dealer for its MFP needs, revealed an enterprise initiative to deploy a self-service business intelligence platform, Impact was excited to partner with them and was well suited to take on the opportunity.
“The client realized that in order to do this correctly, it needed to come up with a way it could centrally manage the data itself, ensure its trustworthiness, and then allow its staff to gain access to it for their own reporting and analysis,” Barrionuevo said. “This meant that they would need someone to assist them with upskilling their staff as part of a broader effort to improve their data literacy. Long term, they envision a future where their IT can manage the infrastructure, permissions, and security of the platform, while the business itself will be able to go to a centralized location for relevant, certified datasets and be comfortable connecting to them to build their own reports and dashboards.
We’ve done a lot of work gathering an understanding of what the data estate looks like, who is involved, and will be working to offer recommendations about how to scale forward their maturity on how they currently manage it.
– Fred Barrionuevo, Impact Networking
“It was timely for us, because the workshop that we were initially engaging with them to get registered for wasn’t really what they needed. Instead, it’s a piece of a larger solution that includes a lot of upfront planning to help them roadmap what data governance, literacy and the analytics platform deployment will look like. A lot of different training needs to happen for their staff, and likely some development of assets and standards too—such as the dashboards that their departments will consume—until we have gotten to a smoothly functioning analytics operation within their organization.”
The client has fully bought into the project with several different committees and executive leadership boosting the effort to become data-driven. Impact is working with members of the client’s IT function and key individuals across their larger departments. The planning groundwork is necessary to simplify the initial deployment phase.
“We’ve done a lot of work gathering an understanding of what the data estate looks like, who is involved, and will be working to offer recommendations about how to scale forward their maturity on how they currently manage it,” Barrionuevo added. “So the initial work is far less on actual design and development of reports and dashboards, and more focused on understanding how to properly roadmap this out and get the right guidelines in place, all the policies and procedures behind an analytics platform. Then, as we move through the roadmap that we agree upon, eventually we’ll get to a point where we’re going to help them with establishing standards around actual reports and dashboards, and maybe even design a few for them.”
Impact’s guidance has been a source of great relief for the client’s IT department, which is lean and tight, thus lacking the bandwidth necessary to support an enterprise-wide launch. One of the metrics the client will be monitoring on the program is its data literacy scores—its ability to read, manipulate and communicate with data (not to mention argue with it)—that Impact has provided some of the initial groundwork for to develop a baseline.
“That’s something that we’re predicting, over time, is going to increase,” he added. “It’s a key factor in successfully improving an organization’s data maturity.”
