01732 759725 38 ONE-TO-ONE 10 years · I00 issues Michelle Ryder caught up with Richard Wells, Head of Office Print Sales at Epson UK to talk about sustainability, heat-free printing and Epson’s channel strategy One-to-one with Richard Wells Michelle Ryder (MR): Epson is very consistent in its messaging around the cost and sustainability benefits of heat-free printing. You have a strong line-up in the entry-level and higherend segments, are there plans to add to your offering and plug the gap in the mid-range. Richard Wells (RW): Our focus is firmly on sustainability – Epson is the most recent entrant into what is a mature and declining market and so we had to differentiate. We might be the latest entrant to the MPS market, but we want to shout the loudest! If we are to be successful and sell lots, we can’t do it by doing exactly the same thing as everyone else. So, we are very proud to lead with the fact that we want to shape the future of printing with heat-free technology. And, yes, early next year we will be extending our offering with a new range that will meet the needs of the mid-market. Epson has been recognised for its approach to sustainability and there are lots of operational and commercial advantages with our offering. For example, Epson printers feature long-life consumables. One of the key points we make to buying managers when talking about the volumes they produce is that they often won’t need to change a consumable during the life of the machine. Even on a mono-only machine we can put in a bag of ink that will last 40,000 pages. Now, that brings lots of operational benefits. It obviously brings commercial ones as well and from an environmental perspective there’s no delivery mileage, no waste packaging, and no extra effort, energy and resources, to keep that printer in use. From a dealers’ perspective there’s a commercial advantage in never needing to supply consumables and at the end of the contract, if the machines come back, and there’s still ink remaining, the ink bags can be reused and put in another device. Our resellers can also optimise ink usage, switching bags out from low volume machines to high volume ones. Now more than ever, our biggest differentiator is the fact that Epson heat-free technology uses much less energy that laser printers. To be fair, we’ve always talked about lower energy consumption and there's always been a receptive audience for that in terms of the environmental saving, but when you actually dig deeper and consider what an 83 per cent saving actually equates to – in today’ climate – it’s a powerful message. Say a customer is spending £10 a month on energy to power their photocopier – an 83 per cent saving is £8.30, if you’ve only got one machine do you need to make the change? But if you’ve got a large fleet – say 100 devices that saving is now worth £830 a month – almost £2,500 per quarter. That’s when the penny drops and for a salesperson that’s a massive opportunity to make deals happen earlier. The minute the energy prices went up, everybody wanted to know more. Because suddenly a saving of 83 per cent against an energy bill has a strong commercial impact. As an example, we were talking to a prospect with a partner, the customer had two years remaining on a contract and they weren’t interested in changing. We were on the radar, potentially in 12 months’ time, then the news hit that energy bills were going to rise exponentially, and they came back to us and said our energy bill is going to go up from £22 million to £48 million a year. We have to look at anything and everything and so we’re now negotiating with them to switch earlier. MR: Epson also offers partners a range of resources to calculate customers’ potential savings including the optimisation tool, can you tell me a bit more about that? RW: We’ve always had an energy calculator based on TEC values and CO2 which was great but didn’t go into much depth, so Epson Europe developed the optimisation tool, we’ve been using it for around 12 months and six months ago From talking to Wells, there is no doubt that he is passionate about the print industry. His experience is extensive and covers all three channels – he worked at Danwood for many years, left to join Midwich with a brief to set-up an MPS division, and after being approached by Epson in 2019, welcomed the opportunity to manage the OEM’s channel and reseller teams. continued... Richard Wells
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