Kyocera Mita has warned dealers to take a more holistic
approach to selling printers and own the document lifecycle, rather
than rely on the meagre returns that come from selling
hardware.
The admonition came at the Japanese manufacturer’s third
Document Solutions Forum this year, held at the Kensington Roof
Gardens with 58 dealers attending the event.
Tracey Rawling Church, head of marketing at Kyocera Mita,
admitted: “No one is ever going to get rich from selling the box,
there is no money left in hardware. So if you want to trade
profitably and protect your customer base, you need to take a more
holistic approach.”
She argued that as the printer and copier markets converged, the
respective channels would look at seizing each other’s business:
“If the IT reseller is not selling a document management
application, it risks losing its customer base to other
suppliers.”
Rawling Church said that until now, IT dealers may have only
sold output, but the opportunity was to manage document import to
networks, looking at the exchange and storage of all documents.
Kyocera revealed its strategy was to encourage its dealers to
form partnerships with specialists, and a raft attended the event,
including document management vendor ZyLAB and print auditor
developer SLM.
Mick Elliott, director of dealer Greenacre Computer Services,
claimed he was looking for an alternative to Hewlett-Packard and
believed there were some common sense messages that came out of the
day.
“All manufacturers’ technology is pretty similar and dealers
need to find a way to stand out from the crowd. Kyocera’s strategy
is common sense,” he argued.
Objectif Lune was showcasing its forms management product, and
managing director Colin Casey agreed it was becoming ever more
important for dealers to seek a unique selling point.