Print and document capture workflow environments continue to get more complex. As part of their solutions, customers want security and better usability. They want a return on their investment not only in reducing paper but also improving workflows and creating new streamlined processes. The specialization required in vertical markets keeps growing.
Vendors need to bring to the table the expertise to help dealers address these issues with clients. Let’s look at three critical areas where vendors need to help dealers in the marketplace.
Expanding Your Resources
Many dealers are resource constrained. In evaluating vendor partners, dealers need to examine the support they will receive. Your vendor partners should expand your sales and marketing assets to help you win business. And they should provide tools to help prospects calculate return on their investment, not only in reducing paper but also reducing workflows and creating new streamlined processes.
Vendor commitment needs to extend beyond programs and include people too. Vendors should deepen a dealer’s team bench so they don’t have to maintain these marketing and sales resources in house. Look for vendor partner programs that offer assigned sales, pre-sales, and technical support along with a committed executive presence. Vendors need to have “buddy systems” in place so that dealers are matched one-on-one with a member of the vendor team—even some senior executives—who are devoted to the lasting success of the partnership and the partners’ business goals.
Pursuing Vertical Markets
Among verticals, the most attractive markets are also the ones that are most complicated to address with solutions. Markets like health care, financial services, and the federal government are driven by complex security and regulatory requirements to gain control of paper-based workflows. And because these are high-priority needs, organizations have budget assigned to address them.
For instance, health care has the best opportunity to move towards paperless work processes, although it will be challenged to go completely paperless. In fact, health care is the only industry that operates under a mandate to achieve paperless transactions, one directed at medical records. The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) outlined multi-stage measurement criteria for health care providers to go paperless.
That said, the primary issue in health care—as in all verticals—is that there needs to be dramatic changes in workflows. For example, there are still numerous processes that require someone to fill out information on paper which then needs to be entered into a health care system.
The concept of enabling secure workflows across multiple devices and users is a fairly common process across vertical opportunities. The big difference among verticals is integration to back-end systems and security requirements that are specific to individual industries. Dealers should look for vendor partners who can bring vertical specialists that know the industry’s workflows into the sales process. This approach can be a major point of differentiation with customers.
Connecting with CIOs
Another factor common among vertical markets, and enterprise deals in general, is the sales process typically brings in CIOs and other senior IT decision makers. This factor makes it important for dealers to team with vendors that have this market expertise and senior selling experience and are willing to be true partners in collaborating during the sales process.
Having the expertise to sit down with CIOs can make a critical difference in achieving sales success. Winning over the CIO can provide an effective counter-weight to cost pressures pursued by purchasing departments that may not fully understand the complexity of the problems you are solving.
A best sales practice for dealers that runs across vertical and enterprise markets is having a vendor partner that can engage with CIOs. These opportunities are typically complex solutions that require deep knowledge of security and regulatory requirements. They include customer issues that involve senior IT executives as decision makers.
Creating a Winning Team
To create teams that can win business, dealers need to team with vendor partners that bolster their expert resources, especially in vertical markets and when engaging with CIOs. In doing so, they will have access to benefits that enable them to maximize revenue opportunities and differentiate their businesses throughout, and even beyond, the sales cycle.
