PRINTITRESELLER.UK 43 VOX POP continued... understand the overall IT environment that printing has to integrate into, so you can offer solutions that allow an office worker to print a memo as well as enable a laboratory system to print a label in a faraway hospital or connect a newly acquired, cloud-based CRM to the printers at users’ home offices. Richard King: Recent studies indicate that a cloud-first strategy is extremely high on all decision-makers’ agendas, however it is clear that buyers are seeking advice and guidance from trusted advisors such as iTS which we are happy to assist with. Tony Milford: Although quality and price remain crucial factors in buyers' requirements, the importance of sustainability and CSR aspirations as key decision-making drivers is now firmly established on many peoples’ supplier selection criteria. MySalesDrive's ability to generate professional, persuasive proposals that effectively communicate not only the technical and financial aspects of the offer but also the energy consumption and positive environmental impacts of the proposed solution immediately reinforces your credibility as a supplier. By actively demonstrating their ability to support clients’ green aspirations, channel vendors can differentiate themselves and ensure that they are not only winning new business, but also avoiding automatic exclusion from opportunities through underselling the contribution they can make in this area. By significantly reducing the entire sales process, from assessment and evaluation to optimisation, closure, and review, MySalesDrive not only reduces the time taken to create proposals and TCO analysis, but also positions both the salesperson and the supplier as trusted, skilled advisors dedicated to assisting clients in achieving their overall business goals. Mark Ash: Digital transformation and innovation to remain competitive, improve business efficiency and enable remote working. Channel vendors can focus on offering cloud solutions that are flexible, scalable and cost-effective. They should also focus on providing excellent customer support, as decisionmakers are often looking for partners who can help them navigate the complex world of cloud IT. The key trends driving decisionmakers' buying habits in professional printing are digitalisation, sustainability, personalisation and automation. Channel vendors should offer solutions that meet these needs, provide optimisation services, and innovate continuously. Steve Holmes: The pressure points driving decision-making vary according to whether an organisation is in the public or the private sector. If we take education for example, many schools are reporting that, due to inflation and the extreme spike in energy costs, they are having to make decisions between heating or eating; whether they keep teaching spaces warm or children fed. Therefore, investments in IT or AV equipment are getting lower and lower on the priority list. Those schools that were able to invest in secure, sustainable and easy-to-use IT solutions should be able to ride out the current financial and energy crisis. But, rather than leave them be, this is a great opportunity for channel vendors to engage with those customers and add value by checking whether they are extracting maximum value from their existing investments; for instance, are they using all of the energy saving functions on a device? If there’s no budget for new IT security solutions, are they maximising their use of the security features built into their print software? In the same vein, are customers on subscription-based plans aware of the features offered by the latest software, or software upgrades? If not, they’re missing the opportunity to extract maximum value from the solutions they’re using. Contacting customers regularly – even if their buying cycle is now out of kilter – will also enable the channel to listen to their customers’ pain points and think about the solutions they can offer their customers when their financial pressures finally ease. In the private sector, many organisations are implementing strategies to help them achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, running in parallel with increasingly stringent ESG goals. At the same time as addressing those challenges, they’re battling with rising costs, diminishing demand, the skills crisis and – depending on the sector – ongoing struggles with sourcing raw materials, chips, supply chain bottlenecks and escalating shipping costs. Of course, there’s no silver bullet to those challenges, but there is scope for the channel to work in a consultative capacity with customers to see where technology can help drive process and efficiency improvements as a way of eking out more productivity from employees or processes. Of course, both private sector and public sector organisations are grappling with the technical, practical and security challenges posed by hybrid working. It is important that print doesn’t slip through the cracks here, given its importance with respect to security, cost, compliance and sustainability. Organisations need to ensure that they’re providing appropriate print services to their endusers as well as deploying solutions that enable them to track and manage print remotely as effectively as they do from the office. PaperCut has responded to this requirement with PaperCut MF and PaperCut Hive. While PaperCut MF is well-known for being well suited to on-prem print management, it is also able to operate in a cloud environment. This makes it suitable for private In the private sector, many organisations are implementing strategies to help them achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, running in parallel with increasingly stringent ESG goals Phil Madders Steve Holmes
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