01732 759725 36 James Goulding sits down with Greig Millar, Chief Revenue Officer at Brother UK to discuss the company’s challenges and achievements over the past 18 months, its sustainability efforts, as well as plans to further enhance Brother UK’s channel support One-to-one with Greig Millar ONE-TO-ONE We also picked up another award from PCR. That was PCR Print Vendor of the Year. That’s slightly different in that it’s voted for by our peers in the IT channel. But it was fantastic to get that recognition as well. JG: Congratulations. So, when I think of Brother, you’ve been very successful in the home printing and general office printing market, but you’re also strong in particular verticals. What is it about Brother’s range that gives you that good vertical reach? GM: There are particular verticals that we are very strong in - we have always been strong within healthcare and I suppose more recently, in retail, Brother printers are used in back-office retail operations, and our breadth of product helps us in there. Our print devices work very well in that type of environment. So, if you’ve got lots of devices scattered across a very decentralised print environment, that’s where we have a strong story to tell and small footprint devices as well. That works great, particularly in the retail environment, but also within healthcare. But all of our other product ranges, like our labelling devices, our scanning devices, our mobile print devices, they all really complement that print offering well. So, what we’ll find is, quite often, we’ll go in to see a retailer, and we can quite quickly then start to talk to them about their logistics operation – about labelling within that logistics operation. We also start talking to them about maybe shelf edge labelling, so we can expand out on that offering. And quite a lot when we’re in front of those customers, they don’t realise that. We go in to talk to them about their traditional print, back-office printing or something, then that can expand. And with existing customers that are already using our products within their business, we can go in and try to expand out that wider offering with them once we have them signed up to a manged print contract. JG: As you say, you’ve historically done very well in healthcare and you’re making in-roads into retail. Are there any other verticals that you’re addressing? GM: Healthcare has been quite challenging over the last year. We primarily sell into primary healthcare, and the way obviously that the economy has been and budgets have been stretched, it’s been quite challenging. But we can look at adjacent markets. So, that could be dentistry for example and we’ve also had some success in veterinary. There are other adjacent marketplaces that fit well with our products and who have similar kind of software requirements, etc. So, we’ve expanded out into those sorts of areas, and we’ve also found some quite different vertical markets that we’ve never had any experience of like agriculture – we’ve won opportunities in agriculture this year, that’s been a new one for us. It’s always quite exciting to find out about those different verticals. To understand what their challenges are, the type of software they’re using, how can we help support that, and can we expand and add other complementary products to help with their end to end business requirements. JG: How do you support your resellers when they target these verticals GM: We are 100% channel-centric, so we will always support the channel 100%. We’ve got a network of resellers – traditional resellers, with vertically aligned teams and we will take our end-user team in there to support them. That’s another benefit we can bring to their business. We’ve got an end-user James Goulding (JG): The last 12 months have been challenging for a lot of businesses, but there have also been positives. What have been your highlights for the last year? Greig Millar (GM): I think it’s been a challenging 18 months in all seriousness – the confidence in buying has not been there. We’ve found with certain verticals that we’ve been selling into; we’ve been challenged with changes in the way that they procure. So, we’ve had quite a challenging 18 months, but there have been some really nice highs, particularly with some retail wins that we’ve experienced over that period of time. There have also been highlights this year, and I think the main thing has been picking up awards. We have just picked up the PC Pro Print Manufacturer of the Year award, that’s the 11th year running that we have won that PC Pro award, which is fantastic, not only because it’s recognition for the team and everything that they do, but it’s actually picked by readers of PC Pro, that’s users of the devices themselves. So, it’s really nice to get confirmation that what we’re putting out into the marketplace is meeting customer needs. Greig Millar
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