ONE-TO-ONE 01732 759725 40 10 years · I00 issues continued... MR: Epson’s route to market is 100 per cent through the channel, what’s your partner strategy across both IT resellers and the OA dealer channel? RW: Epson is a 100 per cent indirect business and our focus now is on net reducing the number of personally managed accounts we have. Our strategy now is to do more with less. Our channel team can only manage so many people and as partners do more business with us, they need more of our time. So, we’re looking to get to a point where an account manager will look after six or 10 partners at the maximum depending on size, geography etc. We will end up with about 60 one-to-one managed accounts, we’ve currently got about 100. We work with two distribution partners – Exertis and Westcoast both of which have dedicated specialist teams that manage printing. They work very closely with the account managers so we’re clear in which partners are managed by distribution rather than by an account manager. We also have an end-user team who support partners on larger opportunities, that team generates opportunities, and we share them with partners. MR: Epson has recently secured its first public sector procurement listing in Scotland. How did that come about? RW: Sustainability is a key procurement component for the public sector, and in Scotland the public sector is more than half of the entire market. We started to work on this a couple of years ago and the biggest issue was figuring out how to get on the Scottish Procurement Framework when we’re not Scottish. In other parts of the UK, public sector compliance to using frameworks is quite low, but in Scotland it is absolutely rock solid – everybody does use it – so getting onto the framework was really critical to our success. What’s interesting is that when we spoke to the people in Scottish Procurement and our Scottish resellers, the general consensus was that unless you're in the central belt, no one cares, so we knew that what we had to do was make sure we could reach customers in the highlands, in Grampian and the borders. So, we approached it in a different way, we can get on the framework as a contractor – that’s the way it works, but we chose to name sub-contractors who can serve their local communities. And that’s why we selected five partners – Active Office, Carbon Group, Highland Copiers, Metrik Solutions and Social Print & Copy. The broad geographic coverage of these resellers means that Epson can offer Scotland’s public sector the same quality of service across all of Scotland, from the borders and central belt through to the highlands and islands. But more importantly, for our partners, earning a place on the framework has significantly increased their addressable market. MR: Obviously, you’re looking to enjoy future growth, what’s the plan moving forward? RW: We have enjoyed sustainable growth to date, and we’ve developed strong relationships with partners who believe in our products and our offering. We are targeting significant growth in the next two years and plan to more than double our business in the next twelve months. The new range will play a crucial role in that as it does open up a massive new addressable market for Epson, as will the ability to combat the supply chain challenges. www.epson.co.uk offered it to our partners. The optimisation tool gives our partners an easy, quantifiable means of converting end-users to an environmentally friendly printing technology while validating their scope 3 greenhouse gas emission reductions. Fully endorsed by DataMaster Lab, the optimisation tool converts end-user printing requirements into a bespoke report that enables dealers to illustrate accurate savings in energy, productivity, waste and cost when converting their customers from laser to Epson’s heat-free inkjet printers. Reports are auto-generated based on a user’s contract length, printer models and quantity, colour and mono printing volumes, time taken and hourly rate for changing supplies, followed by the Epson equivalent solutions. This tool is changing the conversation between resellers and their customers by translating anecdotal messaging about energy, waste, productivity and cost into usable, factual data. The UK channel is far and away the fastest adopter. In fact, even some of the more traditional dealers have changed mind-set – moving from the perception that the sustainability message is great but actually I’m only interested in commission, to really buying into the cause. So instead of just targeting the managing director or financial director, they’re finding out who the sustainability manager is and sending them reports around the CO2 savings they could make based on hard data, and that’s creating new opportunities because they can then present the commercial savings to the FD so everyone is happy. ESG is on everybody’s boardroom agenda today and the Epson proposition is resonating with more and more organisations. MR: One of the biggest challenges facing the print sector has been ongoing supply chain shortages, is that now starting to ease? RW: We haven’t been immune to the stock shortages, and there has been issues, particularly on A4, over the last nine months. Across Europe, we have 24,000 machines on back order, so yes, it’s been a challenge. But the tide is turning, in our Q4 – January through March – we will begin to see stock coming through and we are optimistic that we will recover our stock position completely by April next year. The tide is turning, in our Q4 – we will begin to see stock coming through and we are optimistic that we will recover our stock position completely by April 2023
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