From Canon to Xerox, Epson to Toshiba, Sharp to Lexmark, Ricoh to Konica Minolta, and Brother to Kyocera, the office technology reseller community has more than its share of options for peddling A3 and A4 units. Pretty much this entire crew (along with HP) boasts significant name recognition outside of the industry given their forays into the consumer retail space.
However, once you step into the world of ancillary products, the household names become fewer and fewer, especially from a consumer standpoint. But while office tech dealers are well-versed in vendors, some companies tend to fly under the radar. Even if you may recognize the name, that could conceivably be the extent of your familiarity.
As an offshoot of this month’s State of the Industry report on diversification opportunities with mailing equipment, electric vehicle chargers and VoIP phone systems, we asked our five participating panelists to give you, the reader, an elevator pitch that underscores how their companies are uniquely positioned to serve the office technology dealer community. Who knows, maybe one of these companies could fill a need in your product catalog.
Art Waganheim
Paitec USA
Mailing Equipment
We treat our dealers and the end users as we expect to be treated ourselves by our vendors. It sounds kind of cliché, but it is how we have operated since day one, and it’s always been one of our core principles. We have our sleepless nights; we’ll get a phone call at 4:30 or 5 o’clock because somebody can’t get their machine working. We don’t turn off the lights at five, close the door and then we’ll think about it in the morning. We think about it all night. When we come in first thing in the morning, we can call back and say this is your solution. Some of our vendors are overseas, so we take advantage of those [overnight] hours to reach our partners to get the answers.
We might hear from people only once a year; they may have a machine that’s 10 years old but it needs some work. We help them out as best as we can as opposed to trying to sell them a new machine. Sometimes, a 10-year-old machine is what it is and needs replacing. But we never take the attitude of “sorry, we can’t help you.” A customer who bought a machine from us 10 years ago is just as important as the one that wrote our dealer a check last week.
Mike Hannon
FP Mailing Solutions
Meters and postal equipment
We’re not as large as our two biggest competitors, but we are dealer-focused. We don’t have a brick and mortar operation selling against dealers in any market and we don’t have people out selling or encroaching on one of our dealer’s territories. We are really geared for being more on the support side to the dealer in helping them serve their end-users.
Our entire U.S. main office is just outside Chicago. Everything is here with me—we’re all in the same building: management, call center, warehousing and shipping. When a dealer calls them, they’re talking to the same people. They have relationships with our call center people and our managers. We get to know them, so it makes the conversation and support much easier. We really try to do as much as we can to handle their needs. Having everything here and in one building makes our ability to move things around and get things done a lot easier. Our resellers appreciate it.
Josh Lane
ACDI Energy Services
Electric vehicle (EV) chargers
Our focus has always been helping resellers offer solutions that add value for the customer. We have a great team of tech experts and their combined experience in areas of expertise gives us a huge advantage every day. We create an environment internally where people can experiment. Our people aren’t afraid to look outside the box every now and then. If we fail, we’re going to fail forward. That attitude is being embraced by our reseller partners. Companies in the channel are looking outside of their core competencies and trying to experiment more.
The office technology dealer community is our bread and butter. I want to go with the pace they’re willing to set when it comes to the recharging stations. I’m not trying to ask anyone to risk more than what ACDI has risked. I want to invest alongside our resellers. That mindset prevents too much risk exposure for anybody.
Chuck Goodwin
RingByName
VoIP phone systems
We have a 99% uptime with redundant servers across the United States to make sure that our services are consistently up day after day, year after year. We have a fail over to Amazon Cloud if, for some reason, everything goes catastrophic. So our services remain active. We offer a specialized group for dealer support, available 24/7. That’s one of the biggest benefits. Calls are almost always going to be answered, with a hold time of less than two minutes on average. Plus, we have a very scalable support team. We offer more resources to make sure we continue to provide white-glove customer service to our dealers.
Noel O’Dwyer
Intermedia
VoIP phone systems
We own all the technology, which is pretty unique. All the elements of the fully-integrated solution is all Intermedia. We support the technology, which gives us the advantage of being able to maintain it. We’re not relying on a third party to come in and fix the technology to meet our customers’ needs. From a single pane of glass, you have access to video conferencing, the chat, the voice/phone system itself, secure file sharing and our contact center.
Another differentiator us we handle the taxes and don’t require contracts—we’re on a month-to-month basis. Still, it doesn’t mean that the dealer can’t effectively incorporate this into a one-, three- or five-year lease agreement. But as soon as the customer stops using the product, we stop charging, or as soon as they stop paying for it, we can cut them off. It’s very effective for dealers that we can manage it that way. The reason why we do it is because we have so much confidence in our technology. We know that when the customers get the product, they tend not to leave it.
