Laura Blackmer is nothing if not practical. The senior vice president of Dealer Sales for Konica Minolta Business Solutions, who recently celebrated her six-month anniversary with the manufacturer, employs a laser focus on an objective that is simple, yet challenging. Blackmer wants to provide the dealer channel the full assortment of technologies offered by Konica Minolta—some of which have futuristic undertones—without overwhelming them.
Laura Blackmer
At the same time, Blackmer’s other primary objective is to provide dealers with a clear and uncomplicated path that will enable them to easily bring these technologies to market in an expedient manner. It certainly helps that Blackmer feels Konica Minolta boasts the optimal people, processes and programs to make this practical approach a reality.
Blackmer joins the fold at an exciting juncture in Konica Minolta’s history, given the twin acquisitions of Muratec and TLS.NET that have fortified the OEM’s vision of transforming into an IT services and managed services business. ENX Magazine sat down with Blackmer to discuss a number of key points that are driving the Konica Minolta conversation, from production and industrial print to the Workplace of the Future and the Workplace Hub. How all of these technologies can be translated into dealer success stories is foremost in her mind.
Tell us about your career path leading up to current position at Konica Minolta.
Blackmer: I began with National Cash Register right out of college and spent less than two years there before being recruited by HP following the launch of the HP LaserJet. They were looking for someone to sell to the reseller community. That got me interested in working with channels. I held a number of positions in my 19 years at HP, and more than 90 percent of my time was spent in a channels role, either directly supporting resellers and managing sales teams regionally, or handling major accounts. I left HP to work for a startup based in New York City. Kevin Gilroy, who was previously with HP, asked me to run his channel and sales business. After that, I stayed at home for a couple of years with my children before joining Intermec in a U.S. channel sales leadership role. I did that for three years, then was recruited by Sharp, which was my first entry into this industry. In December of 2017, I joined Konica Minolta and recently passed my six-month mark.
How would you characterize your first six months at the helm of channel sales?
Blackmer: Konica Minolta is a great company with fantastic leadership, excellent people and products. What’s impressed me the most is that Konica Minolta has figured out the future to some degree, particularly those products, services and solutions that are going to be important in the next five to 10 years. Learning about the products and strategies surrounding them has been tremendous. It’s the classic case of flying the 747 while you’re painting it. When I first came on board, (President and CEO) Rick Taylor gave me a bit of a marching order to get our pricing and development programs where they needed to be. We just launched new programs for both, retroactive to April 1. It’s really designed around making sure we can go to market quickly and be easy to do business with, which is a constant mantra for manufacturers. Now, I’m looking ahead toward the mid- and long-term items.
Tell us about the feedback you’ve received from the dealer base, and what changes (if any) might be implemented? What is your role in this regard?
Blackmer: Our dealer base has larger players who tend to be more established. I’ve been able to visit 30-plus dealers in six months, and we just concluded our dealer trip, where I got to meet another 60. The dealers are excited about products and solutions, such as the Workplace Hub and industrial print. They’ve been asking us to make it easier for them to ingest and bring to their customers. They want to know how they can prepare for these evolutions in order to sell and support a new class of products that they can turn around quickly and become successful.
One valuable piece of feedback came from a large Midwest dealer. They like the fact that Konica Minolta’s sales team is adept at figuring out what kind of people, training and marketing they will need, and what customers they should target to bring an industrial print product to market. That dealer closed its first sale within 90 days of having initial discussions, which is pretty amazing considering industrial print has longer sales cycles. Dealers are looking for constructive support in preparing to sell new lines.
Last summer, Konica Minolta announced the acquisition of Muratec America. How can Muratec’s strengths as a provider of industrial labeling and finishing solutions translate into success for your dealers?
Blackmer: Muratec was embarking on a new product category in the printing business around labeling. They had done a great deal of research and found a strong vendor. At the same time, Konica Minolta was doing something similar, but at the upper end of the spectrum from a product perspective. These are coming together, and we’re starting to roll out a full lineup of industrial-labeling products that we wouldn’t have had as quickly without Muratec. We’ll offer not just a couple of labeling products on the high end, but a full spectrum that dealers in secondary and tertiary markets—where Muratec has had a lot of strength—can leverage. Their dealers can get into this business fairly easily and grow into some of the higher-end products. At the same time, some of our Konica Minolta dealers will jump on the industrial side and now have a full breadth of products to go after. We’re pretty excited about that.
Konica Minolta’s acquisition of TLS.NET added expanded competence within voice, cloud and IT solutions. How have dealers embraced these solutions?
Blackmer: All Covered has a huge breadth of product offerings from straightforward managed IT services to project business and TLS.NET managed voice, plus they have some strong vertical-specific offerings. That can be somewhat difficult for a dealer to take on all at once, because there are a lot of choice points. Managed voice is an incredibly powerful cloud-based offering that is simple and fits most dealers’ monthly-recurring revenue models. It’s an easy sale to customers who have purchased our A3 devices, MFPs or MPS offerings. Instead of tossing the entire All Covered portfolio at a dealer, we’re focused on the managed-voice aspect, showing them how they can add that recurring monthly revenue while locking tighter into customers. Dealers don’t have to hire specialists or retrain their sales force for the process. I’m hoping we can bring that TLS.NET offering to the dealers and use it as an opening to bring in other All Covered services as they get comfortable with that market.
As Konica Minolta continues to cultivate its Workplace of the Future platform, how would you characterize its reception by the marketplace?
Blackmer: It’s not a product or a state where you’ll be able to say, OK, we’ve achieved it. The Workplace of the Future is a focus on the people, the technology and the workspace of the business, along with the pieces that can be brought in to help evolve that business. Managed voice is the Workplace of the Future, as is someone who is using a robust Papercut solution with a workflow. The idea is that if they start to pull these pieces together at a customer, dealers can help their customers evolve. When I talk to dealers, I focus on the solutions that we’re bringing to bear that, once executed, will evolve them into the Workplace of the Future.
There are more futuristic aspects of it, such as the ALICE Receptionist, and the Team conference room management and scheduling tool. The Workplace concept can be overwhelming to the dealer community, so we need to prepare them for these different offerings, and help them change the dialogue they’re having with their customers. That’s when this will start to be a state of mind. I think Workplace of the Future is closer than it might seem, because there are so many pieces we’re already executing on.
Can you provide us with an update on the Workplace Hub?
Blackmer: It’s still in beta, but we’ve been getting tremendous, positive feedback. There are two trends happening in the IT world these days. I think Dell coined the phrase “hyper convergence,” which is formerly separate components in the IT space coming together in a single platform that can be managed as integrated components. The other is the idea that first took root in the early 2000s that everything was moving to the cloud; doing software as a service, HR as a service. As with most pendulum swings, that swing to all cloud is not going to materialize—it’s actually going to come back. We’re seeing some critical business components coming back to on-premise, and that’s being driven to some degree by security and the speed to implement.
Workplace Hub
Those two dynamics come together in the Workplace Hub product. For one, it’s a hyper converged product, an amazing stack of software and tools, and it’s bringing some of those business-critical items back to a business. This is a solid SMB tool and it’s going to have incredibly strong verticals, with versions for the health care, education and potentially legal markets, and it can be sold as a service. That’s a model the dealer community truly understands. As we get closer to its release, we’re spending more time talking about what it’s going to take to prepare the dealer in terms of training and demonstrations. It’s going to fit nicely into the dealer’s existing customer base.
In April, Konica Minolta unveiled its marketing planning and analytics platform. Can you talk about the value it adds to dealer portfolios in going beyond hardware?
Blackmer: Last year we announced our Domino Decisions tool, which is part of our production print business that provides a dealer who’s selling those machines the ability to offer their customers a marketing-as-a-service analytics tool. The dealers can sell or offer it for free. It’s a tool for customers who are purchasing production print products and have high marketing output. This gives them some tools that they may not normally have in the course of doing business. This is one of the better platforms on the market.
From a macro perspective, continued margin pressure is affecting the dealers and manufacturers. If a dealer can show revenue and unit growth, that’s a good sign.
Laura Blackmer
How would you grade Konica Minolta’s efforts in growing the ECM and 3D printing business? What are the keys to success in that regard?
Blackmer: 3D has been a tough, fragmented market. Finding the right applications for it has been challenging for a lot of the manufacturers. We see it as a maturing business, but we’re continuing to invest in it. From an applications standpoint, we’re looking at the verticals that are most likely to embrace it, like the education market. We’re still evolving that business.
The ECM business, on the other hand, is a great opportunity for dealers. It was a solid double-digit growth category for 2017, and that momentum has continued this year. Dealers have truly embraced the idea of solving customer needs around scanning, back-file conversion and the redesign of general business process. Most customers need some degree of work around their scanning—the whole process they use in their own businesses. The dealers are finding that if they ask the right questions around it, the result is an easy sale. What we’ve done over the past 12 months is provide higher levels of resource for the dealers, especially around areas such as the Square 9 offering, so that they’re not left out there. If they do get a customer that is eager to do some business process re-engineering, we can bring resources to bear on behalf of the dealer to help.
What changes in the BTA space are influencing your go-to-market strategy, and what influences will play a role in your strategy going forward?
Blackmer: Definitely consolidation. Five or 10 years ago, most dealer purchases were being done by manufacturers. Now, 80 percent of the consolidation is probably either dealer on dealer, with some of it backed by private equity. That presents its own set of opportunities and challenges. We’re working with fewer dealers and many larger ones, and we have to make sure we can craft and support that base. We’ve been able to work closely with these dealers and provide the tools that they need, which has been a strength of Konica Minolta.
From a macro perspective, continued margin pressure is affecting the dealers and manufacturers. If a dealer can show revenue and unit growth, that’s a good sign. We have to continue to look for ways to augment our portfolio of products, and make sure that the dealers are getting as much of the IT spend as they can. That’s why managed IT is so important. Dealers are also looking for opportunities in industrial print that can augment the revenue in their customer base. MPS is a good way to offset declining page volumes, and we’re doing a refresh of our MPS offering this fall. I can’t overemphasize how important that is for dealers to consider industrial print and production print, because those are rich, high-value pages that can bring a lot of cash back into the business. Konica Minolta still has a huge opportunity for unit growth. We have a strong product portfolio and I think our approach to the market is spot on. So we have opportunities to grow our market share and grow this business.
What are your goals for the next 18 months?
Blackmer: Now that we’ve focused on our pricing and dealer programs, the next piece I am working on is the people who are working with our dealers on a daily basis. I want to make Konica Minolta a great place for our dealer team to work. We’re investing in learning events this summer that focus on products, solutions, ECM, Workplace of the Future and other financial skills. We’re investing in our team because, frankly, we’re only as good to a dealer as the people they interact with day in and day out. So we’re giving that team as many best-of-breed tools, training sessions and information resources as possible. On the external side, it goes back to some of the feedback I received, which has really helped us get prepared for these products. We’re putting a lot of energy into the Workplace Hub and ensuring that when we bring it to the dealers, it’s got all of the pieces they need to be successful. I want to continue to grow our managed voice and industrial print as well. If you ask Rick Taylor, we’ve got to hit our targets and goals. We’ve already started down the road of executing our strategies, and I’m confident the outcome will speak to those goals.
