Cloud native MFPs

[BillyCarpenter]

At the end of the day, a company had better know the market they're in and know their place. There's a rule in business that says if you're a new company and you're going up against a well established national company, in order to compete your service/product needs to be a lot better or the customer will always go with the trusted company. It can't be a little better, it has to be a lot better or they'll go with the trusted company.

Or perhaps a company would be better off finding their niche in their market. There is no one size fits all business strategy.


As far as the IT world, training will be dependent on what services you plan to offer. Are you gonna be setting up servers and networks? Food for thought.

[SalesServiceGuy]

Many dealers are often stretched out of their comfort zones if they accept National account installs sold by their OEM sales teams or dealers in other territories demanding the latest in technology and features.

Besides the obvious benefit of new revenue that they did not have to find themselves these dealers often get the used copier coming out at little to no cost in exchange for their labour.

Certainly not every install is going to require every feature available and certainly many national accounts will have their own IT teams to complete the install.

[mloudy]

All of our largest accounts have their own staffed IT departments.

We have done several ship-in installs for an OEM and those accounts all have IT support by a remote company with zero local support.

We are a mom & pop have-not I would guess. I have heard lots of doom and gloom over the last 37 years of what was going to put us out of business. The last two warnings were that the new HP inkjets were going to kill our business. These warnings came from two people who have been in the industry for decades. Small city (13,000) and we are the county seat. I have seen three OEM dealerships come and go from our little city along with three indepentants. A dealer that offers full IT services started hitting this area hard 5+ years ago and took a handfull of our customers. Last week we got back the last of them that left us for this amazing non-mom & pop company that offers everything from security solutions and managed IT to copiers/printers.

20+ years ago we hired someone and sent them through training to get their MCSE. He still loves to learn and stay educated. I know enough to cover for him when he is not here. We do not offer any IT support or services that do not directly involve our equipment and currently have no plans to start offering managed IT. I could be wrong but I think we will be just fine for a little while longer.

[rthonpm]

All of our largest accounts have their own staffed IT departments.

We have done several ship-in installs for an OEM and those accounts all have IT support by a remote company with zero local support.

We are a mom & pop have-not I would guess. I have heard lots of doom and gloom over the last 37 years of what was going to put us out of business. The last two warnings were that the new HP inkjets were going to kill our business. These warnings came from two people who have been in the industry for decades. Small city (13,000) and we are the county seat. I have seen three OEM dealerships come and go from our little city along with three indepentants. A dealer that offers full IT services started hitting this area hard 5+ years ago and took a handfull of our customers. Last week we got back the last of them that left us for this amazing non-mom & pop company that offers everything from security solutions and managed IT to copiers/printers.

20+ years ago we hired someone and sent them through training to get their MCSE. He still loves to learn and stay educated. I know enough to cover for him when he is not here. We do not offer any IT support or services that do not directly involve our equipment and currently have no plans to start offering managed IT. I could be wrong but I think we will be just fine for a little while longer.

It all depends on what your customers expect. Most of mine are small businesses that deal with much larger ones or poached management from larger ones so their expectations are a little different. Covid also made a lot of them shift from everyone onsite all the time to working from wherever they happen to be.

The guys out in a machine shop who print checklists for builds are going to need very different things than a laboratory environment where everything has to be electronic or saved as such. One of my earlier posts may have led some to think that I'm in the paper is dead camp: I'm not there yet because it still has a very strong use case, I just don't see it as much as I did with some of my customers, and when I do it's usually as an intermediate step.

What really drives business at the end of the day is people skills: technical ability can be trained, but the soft skills are what is not only going to make a sale, but also keep it even if there are limitations to what you can provide.

[mloudy]

I will say that almost every sale now requires assistance from either our IT Tech or me. I am sure there are sales reps that can answer many of these questions that come up but some of them require real world in-house testing. Still most installs are simple and straight forward.

Our largest customer accounts for 10% of our revenue and their workflow requires a tremdous amount of printing throughout their manufacturing process. They told us about a year ago we would see a drop in pages printed because they were changing their process. They also wanted to add Papercut a year ago. Their page output is still increasing month over month and they have put Papercut on the back burner.

[BillyCarpenter]

What really drives business at the end of the day is people skills: technical ability can be trained, but the soft skills are what is not only going to make a sale, but also keep it even if there are limitations to what you can provide.

A good sales person/staff are the ones who drive growth, no doubt. But it's the support/tech staff that keeps the business.

Both technical ability and sales skills can be learned. There's no such thing as a born salesman. There are salesman that wing it, and then there are professional sales people that have been trained. Big difference.

[Rewind!]

Most of the "cloud" based units/systems/appliances suck... the user interfaces are slow, and consume way more time/steps to get the job done. the closest native units Ive seen are the HP models. That being said, those suck as well. Currently the best/fastest setup with cloud integration is something you can have on your local network that in turn interfaces with cloud based services. Just my 2 cents.

JC

[SalesServiceGuy]

Most of the "cloud" based units/systems/appliances suck... the user interfaces are slow, and consume way more time/steps to get the job done. the closest native units Ive seen are the HP models. That being said, those suck as well. Currently the best/fastest setup with cloud integration is something you can have on your local network that in turn interfaces with cloud based services. Just my 2 cents.

JC

... your two cents are out of date. All of the Toshiba Cloud apps that I have worked with, especially related to MS365, are fast to respond and require few keystrokes when paired with a current model MFP.

Otherwise customers would never order them.