Print.IT Reseller - issue 50

01732 759725 46 Q&A Some people just want a scalable financial solution where they can deploy that or depreciate that over a few years, and other customers are still just like we’ll buy it and run it ...continued do for example, recurring billing. They might not have the salesforce with the relevant skills to perhaps do financial based selling. So, there’s an awful lot of hand- holding needed, if somebody wants to mature into becoming a competent partner there. And it’s part of our job to walk with them on that process – very much the ‘Brother at Your Side’ philosophy. And we’ve seen some super success with partners who’ve chosen to take that journey with us. PITR: As part of your strategy of getting closer to the customer, are there specific vertical sectors you’re really concentrating on? PJ: Yes, Brother has become quite well known actually as a real powerhouse in vertical marketing and the team do a fantastic job in this particular space. So in the last perhaps, three to five years, we’ve been very busy developing sector solutions and some of our most popular sector solutions are places like the electrical market, where we’ve developed some products and labels specifically for that marketplace. Brother is a significant provider into the primary healthcare market for computer printers primarily. But we are also now seeing a significant vertical sector emerge with our scanning products where we’re doing an awful lot of scanning straight into systems and making legal practices more productive. So we campaign on a few themes at Brother around productivity and digitisation particularly. PITR: How is Brother helping end- users meet the challenges they face? PJ: Brother as a company try and stay very close to what’s going on with our customers and we talk about that world in two different ways. One is about the trading environment that we’re all within and then there’s the climate within the environment. So every company has got a slightly different climate relevant to the external environment that they’re operating within. Some people perhaps have growing pains even in a rapidly changing environment they’re growing rapidly. Other people might be moving, others might be actually having problems adapting. So what you’ve got to understand is actually what climate each customer is experiencing that you can help them with. For some, it is actually about providing a technology or solution which allows them to scale and because they're growing very quickly it gives them that comfort to know that they can grow with you. For another company, that solution could be that we just need to rapidly reduce our costs or get more productive. For Brother, I try and make sure that as a company we never go out with a one- size-fits-all solution. What we’re about is listening deeply, understanding the pain points that people are experiencing and then making sure we have a permission to play to try and help them resolve them. So for me, it’s all about the relevancy of our offer and just making sure that what we bring generally makes sense to somebody and helps them solve the problems they’re experiencing at the particular point in time they’re experiencing them. PITR: Does a more collaborative relationship encourage customers to buy solutions as a service? PJ: More and more customers want to buy products from us on a service-based model nowadays. So we kind of have it in our minds as BaaS – Brother as a Service – so what is it you want to buy and how do you want to buy it? Some people just want a scalable financial solution where they can deploy that or depreciate that over a few years, and other customers are still just like we’ll buy it and run it. But we are seeing a very strong trend