Diversify, diversify, diversify

If there was only one thing you would like to walk away with from our recent webinars with channel partners, and discussions with our Lexmark team this year, it would be this: diversifying is the single most critical thing resellers can do today to future-proof their businesses.

Prior to this year, our industry had never seen large printers and copiers sitting on the aisles of empty offices. But we now know these things can happen. We also know that preferences of workers and organisations have changed, and that working from home is now the default for many, and that going to the office is good more occasional and even optional.

As you know, from a printing perspective, our company advocates for resellers to prefer selling smaller and more efficient printers to serve the needs of teams working from their homes (nobody is going to take home a large A3 printer, so A4 printers are the more convenient alternative).

But beyond printing, there’s a huge benefit for our print resellers to add more to their offering, to go beyond printing and take a bite from other areas too, like IT and office supplies. I point out to these two because businesses in these industries are likely to move into printing too.

If you have the technical capacity to include IT services as part of your offering, you should do so. But if you don’t, there are two alternatives you can consider. The first one is to offer adjacent solutions to managed print services, such as workflow solutions, e-signature, cloud document archiving solutions, etc. These are the lower hanging fruits and Lexmark Cloud Services can certainly be part of that mix.

The second alternative is to partner up with an IT services provider so that you can offer a combined solution. Remember that the pandemic has been a transformational time for all industries, so you may find that IT services providers are also on the lookout for new opportunities, and diversifying their offering by offering managed print services in partnership with someone like you, could be an attractive prospect.

What you shouldn’t try to do is to go it alone in IT services. If you only offer managed print services today, chances are that you don’t have the technical capacity in-house to deliver IT services. So, you’ll be better off by partnering with someone with that expertise and experience.

Besides the financial benefits of adding IT services to your offering, there’s an additional value for the print side of your business, and that is learning from how IT services are charged and apply that to printing. Much like a law firm, IT service providers will tend to work on a retainer basis for a basic level of service and would charge an additional part only for things beyond scope. You could learn a lot from an IT services partner.

The business to consider is office supplies. This business usually requires scale but can still be part of your offering. By now you, have probably developed a remote work offering that includes other IT hardware other than just print, but with office supplies you could go an extra mile. Partnering with an office supplies company is also a good option. In this case, besides the financial benefit, you could also learn a lot from their e-commerce capabilities and the logistics behind them. Ultimately, success in any industry will depend on our ability to be flexible and offer alternatives. And right now, the majority of print resellers in Australia and New Zealand do not offer an e-commerce interface in their website for customers looking to buy supplies directly without a sales call.

Printing isn’t going to go away and getting drawn into this debate can only be distracting. But printing, as many other services, has discovered that demand can be abruptly interrupted by things beyond our control. We’re not all going to become a one-stop-shop for everything, but by now it should be clear that excessive specialisation could carry excessive risks.

Anthony Toope is Lexmark’s Australia and New Zealand Channel Marketing Manager