PRINTITRESELLER.UK 37 ONE-TO-ONE nearly 30,000 devices contracted under one flavour of managed print. We still find there’s lots of resellers out there who believe that it seems too complicated, seems too complex. So, for them, we’ve got simplified managed print options in, say, MPS Essential. We can tailor the reseller’s abilities, or where they think they are on their journey, and we’ve got an offering for them and working alongside them. But equally, we have resellers, who are very mature in providing software and services and managed print. And in that sense, we can essentially offer them support on consumables so they can plug it all into their own DCA or their own offering. So yes, everything from the simplest to the most complicated. We are finding more and more resellers if they’ve not had experience in managed print, are now realising that there’s money being left on the table. Somebody else is going to be selling those consumables to those customers if they don’t. So, they’re understanding the opportunity. JG: Talking of consumables, sustainability, I know has always been a big concern of Brother’s, you’ve had cartridge recycling in Ruabon Wales for many years, and you’ve now added inkjet cartridge recycling. Is sustainability a big competitive advantage for you? GM: Yes, it is. I don’t think we do a good enough job yet of getting that message across out into the managed print and the benefits that a managed print agreement can bring their end customer, and we’ve found some of those resellers are then able to expand out into print. And it’s an extra item in the basket that they would have missed out on historically. So, we’ve found some real good success with different resellers. We’ve even got software providers that we’re finding opportunities with, by working closely with them and taking in the wider team, including our end-user team, our pre-sales team and our internal marketing functions to really support on any bids or customer interactions that they need help with. We’re there to support with winning that piece of business with them. JG: You mentioned managed print services, and you’ve now got three packages, Essential, Professional and Enterprise. What impact has that had for your partners and potentially new partners? GM: At Brother, we talk about MPS as if it’s kind of like a new thing, but we’ve been doing it a long time now. We’ve got team that can go in, they can do account mapping, we can understand what verticals we can align where we’ve had successes, but also, like the agriculture example I gave, we can try to find out more about how our products would support that business and align the end-user team and other resources, pre-sales, etc. They can all go into those accounts with channel resellers, and help support them to win those opportunities, ultimately, and give them everything that they would require, help them on customer meetings, help them write bids, all of that support we can add. So, it’s about working in collaboration with the channel to ensure that we can close those opportunities for them. JG: I can see that sort of support would be very useful for resellers that might have specialised in IT or comms and are now moving into print to meet certain customer demand. Are you getting many of those types of resellers? GM: Because of our background in fax, we’ve traditionally always had a good relationship with IT, comms, distributors and resellers. But we also have relationships within the Auto-ID area. So, we’ve got Auto-ID resellers that would traditionally just be selling those products, so labelling, mobile, print. But what we have found this year is they’ve got the same customers as some of the other traditional reseller network and they’re just focused on Auto- ID products. We can talk to them about continued...
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