Michelle Ryder caught up with Richard Wells, Head of Office Print Sales at Epson UK to talk about sustainability, heat-free printing and Epson’s channel strategy
From talking to Wells, there is no doubt that he is passionate about the print industry. His experience is extensive and covers all three channels – he worked at Danwood for many years, left to join Midwich with a brief to set-up an MPS division, and after being approached by Epson in 2019, welcomed the opportunity to manage the OEM’s channel and reseller teams.
Michelle Ryder (MR): Epson is very consistent in its messaging around the cost and sustainability benefits of heat-free printing. You have a strong line-up in the entry-level and higher- end segments, are there plans to add to your offering and plug the gap in the mid-range.
Richard Wells (RW): Our focus is firmly on sustainability – Epson is the most recent entrant into what is a mature and declining market and so we had to differentiate. We might be the latest entrant to the MPS market, but we want to shout the loudest! If we are to be successful and sell lots, we can’t do it by doing exactly the same thing as everyone else. So, we are very proud to lead with the fact that we want to shape the future of printing with heat-free technology. And, yes, early next year we will be extending our offering with a new range that will meet the needs of the mid-market.
Epson has been recognised for its approach to sustainability and there are lots of operational and commercial advantages with our offering. For example, Epson printers feature long-life consumables. One of the key points we make to buying managers when talking about the volumes they produce is that they often won’t need to change a consumable during the life of the machine. Even on a mono-only machine we can put in a bag of ink that will last 40,000 pages. Now, that brings lots of operational benefits. It obviously brings commercial ones as well and from an environmental perspective there’s no delivery mileage, no waste packaging, and no extra effort, energy and resources, to keep that printer in use.
From a dealers’ perspective there’s a commercial advantage in never needing to supply consumables and at the end of the contract, if the machines come back, and there’s still ink remaining, the ink bags can be reused and put in another device. Our resellers can also optimise ink usage, switching bags out from low volume machines to high volume ones.
Now more than ever, our biggest differentiator is the fact that Epson heat-free technology uses much less energy that laser printers. To be fair, we’ve always talked about lower energy consumption and there’s always been a receptive audience for that in terms of the environmental saving, but when you actually dig deeper and consider what an 83 per cent saving actually equates to – in today’ climate – it’s a powerful message.
Say a customer is spending £10 a month on energy to power their photocopier – an 83 per cent saving is £8.30, if you’ve only got one machine do you need to make the change? But if you’ve got a large fleet – say 100 devices that saving is now worth £830 a month – almost £2,500 per quarter. That’s when the penny drops and for a salesperson that’s a massive opportunity to make deals happen earlier.
The minute the energy prices went up, everybody wanted to know more. Because suddenly a saving of 83 per cent against an energy bill has a strong commercial impact. As an example, we were talking to a prospect with a partner, the customer had two years remaining on a contract and they weren’t interested in changing. We were on the radar, potentially in 12 months’ time, then the news hit that energy bills were going to rise exponentially, and they came back to us and said our energy bill is going to go up from £22 million to £48 million a year. We have to look at anything and everything and so we’re now negotiating with them to switch earlier.
MR: Epson also offers partners a range of resources to calculate customers’ potential savings including the optimisation tool, can you tell me a bit more about that?
RW: We’ve always had an energy calculator based on TEC values and CO2 which was great but didn’t go into much depth, so Epson Europe developed the optimisation tool, we’ve been using it for around 12 months and six months ago offered it to our partners.
The optimisation tool gives our partners an easy, quantifiable
means of converting end-users to an environmentally friendly printing technology while validating their scope 3 greenhouse gas emission reductions. Fully endorsed by DataMaster Lab, the optimisation tool converts end-user printing requirements into a bespoke report that enables dealers to illustrate accurate savings in energy, productivity, waste and cost when converting their customers from laser to Epson’s heat-free inkjet printers.
Reports are auto-generated based on a user’s contract length, printer models and quantity, colour and mono printing volumes, time taken and hourly rate for changing supplies, followed by the Epson equivalent solutions.
This tool is changing the conversation between resellers and their customers by translating anecdotal messaging about energy, waste, productivity and cost into usable, factual data.
The UK channel is far and away the fastest adopter. In fact, even some of the more traditional dealers have changed mind-set – moving from the perception that the sustainability message is great but actually I’m only interested in commission, to really buying into the cause. So instead of just targeting the managing director or financial director, they’re finding out who the sustainability manager is and sending them reports around the CO2 savings they could make based on hard data, and that’s creating new opportunities because they can then present the commercial savings to the FD so everyone is happy. ESG is on everybody’s boardroom agenda today and the Epson proposition is resonating with more and more organisations.
MR: One of the biggest challenges facing the print sector has been ongoing supply chain shortages, is that now starting to ease?
RW: We haven’t been immune to the stock shortages, and there has been issues, particularly on A4, over the last nine months. Across Europe, we have 24,000 machines on back order, so yes, it’s been a challenge. But the tide is turning, in our Q4 – January through March – we will begin to see stock coming through and we are optimistic that we will recover our stock position completely by April next year.
MR: Epson’s route to market is 100 per cent through the channel, what’s your partner strategy across both IT resellers and the OA dealer channel?
RW: Epson is a 100 per cent indirect business and our focus now is on net reducing the number of personally managed accounts we have. Our strategy now is to do more with less. Our channel team can only manage so many people and as partners do more business with us, they need more of our time. So, we’re looking to get to a point where an account manager will look after six or 10 partners at the maximum depending on size, geography etc. We will end up with about 60 one-to-one managed accounts, we’ve currently got about 100.
We work with two distribution partners – Exertis and Westcoast both of which have dedicated specialist teams that manage printing. They work very closely with the account managers so we’re clear in which partners are managed by distribution rather than by an account manager.
We also have an end-user team who support partners on larger opportunities, that team generates opportunities, and we share them with partners.
MR: Epson has recently secured its first public sector procurement listing in Scotland. How did that come about?
RW: Sustainability is a key procurement component for the public sector, and in Scotland the public sector is more than half of the entire market. We started to work on this a couple of years ago and the biggest issue was figuring out how to get on the Scottish Procurement Framework when we’re not Scottish.
In other parts of the UK, public sector compliance to using frameworks is quite low, but in Scotland it is absolutely rock solid – everybody does use it – so getting onto the framework was really critical to our success. What’s interesting is that when we spoke to the people in Scottish Procurement and our Scottish resellers, the general consensus was that unless you’re in the central belt, no one cares, so we knew that what we had to do was make sure we could reach customers in the highlands, in Grampian and the borders.
So, we approached it in a different way, we can get on the framework as a contractor – that’s the way it works, but we chose to name sub-contractors who can serve their local communities. And that’s why we selected five partners – Active Office, Carbon Group, Highland Copiers, Metrik Solutions and Social Print & Copy. The broad geographic coverage of these resellers means that Epson can offer Scotland’s public sector the same quality of service across all of Scotland, from the borders and central belt through to the highlands and islands.
But more importantly, for our partners, earning a place on the framework has significantly increased their addressable market.
MR: Obviously, you’re looking to enjoy future growth, what’s the plan moving forward?
RW: We have enjoyed sustainable growth to date, and we’ve developed strong relationships with partners who believe in our products and our offering. We are targeting significant growth in the next two years and plan to more than double our business in the next twelve months. The new range will play a crucial role in that as it does open up a massive new addressable market for Epson, as will the ability to combat the supply chain challenges.
