PARTNERING FOR SUCCESS

With complete document solutions requiring an executive sales pitch, business analysis, and a working knowledge of systems through email to storage and workflow, it's a wonder any resellers have started down the print solutions path.

"A document management solution needs to be applied across the whole technology platform, so it's a market transition which favours value-added resellers and integrators over the more traditional office equipment resellers," Oki's Harman said.

However, those resellers who lack the technical skills to make the transition from speeds and feeds to solution based selling need not lose heart.

Kisselbach suggested there was often the opportunity to partner with other resellers and share the market. "The resellers who understand that the market is moving in a different direction are teaming up with other business partners to offer increased digital storage capacity, or better integration," Kisselbach said.

"You're better off teaming up with others to offer a complete solution rather than lose out on the business altogether." In other cases vendors are willing to bring knowledge gained rolling out document management technologies into the enterprise.

"We've had a lot of experience rolling out these technologies to enterprise and government, so we can work with dealers while we're in the process of applying those same technologies to the small to medium business sector," Lexmark's Bell said.

NEVER-ENDING STORY

The benefits to those who make the shift into this emerging market are tremendous, industry representatives agreed.

According to HP's Kaye, a print solution offering is more akin to the consultative sell associated with professional services, with some interesting, and profitable consequences for the reseller.

"It becomes much more focused on solving the customers' needs and is less susceptible to using price as the only discriminator, thereby retaining profitability for resellers," Kaye said. "The most profitable resellers are deriving greater revenues from services and in addition, services-led engagements tend to result in longer term supplier relationships."

Gartner's Yeung said the next 12 months will see an increasing emphasis on print solutions selling, as traditional print resellers continue to struggle with desperately low margins.

"I believe that document management solutions and related services will be offered from the vendors for business and office customers to save their printing costs and increase their staff productivity and effi ciency," Yeung said.

Moreover, Yeung said, while the margin squeeze benefits customers at the expense of resellers, the print solution sales offered gains on all sides. On the one hand customers get increased efficiency of data management, physical consolidation of print resources, improved workflow, reduced costs and more efficient data tracking.

While on the other, vendors and resellers can compete on their technology and service offering, rather than on price, will be seen by the customer as a business partner, and not merely a reseller.

Far from being seen as a necessary complication, Epson's Pleasants advised resellers to embrace the longer sales cycle associated with the print management sales cycle, and use it to their advantage.

"The sales process will take longer, there will be more people involved in making the decision, and the knowledge and understanding will be at a much higher level than for a speeds and feeds approach," Pleasants said. "This will provide the reseller with greater opportunities in ongoing sales and support, but again at a higher level of complexity than just moving a box out the door."

According to Kisselbach, this ongoing relationship needs to be factored into the sale from the very beginning, and goes hand-in-hand with the strategic nature of the solutions sell.

"The key challenge is to map those pain points at various levels of the company," Kisselbach said. "Resellers need to find out where the company is going, find out what their mission statement is and where they want to be in five years' time."

And if Mitronics is any indication, resellers that manage to make the transition should be confident of success in a more complex, but more rewarding market.

"It's been hard, it's a process of ongoing change, but it's been worth it. We are already expanding the business and we intend to expand further in the next 12 months," Amir said. "We're actually being approached by other resellers looking to get out of the game, because they can't survive on the margins on the box, so I expect we'll just keep on growing."