THE SMB QUESTIONS SMALL CUSTOMER BUSINESSES SHOULD · 2018. 11. 28. · 22 Marketing Has Changed Forever — If You Blinked You May Have Missed It by DAVID CUMINGS AND JOHN M. ZINDAR

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QUESTIONS SMALL BUSINESSES SHOULD ASK WHEN SELECTINGPRINTERS

ARE SELF-LIMITINGBELIEFS HOLDINGYOU BACK?

APPLICATIONS YOURDEALERSHIP SHOULDBE USING

DELIVERING MULTI-CHANNEL SUPPORT TOTHE SMB CUSTOMER

+

OUTSOURCING DOCUMENT ARCHIVINGAND STORAGE SOLVES EXPENSIVEHEADACHES FOR SMBS

+

THE SMB CUSTOMER

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June 2016 volume 7, no. 3

14Proposed logo revision, 07/2010, EH

pg.

22

pg.

pg.

30IN EVERY ISSUE

6 Editor’s Letter Contributors

8 Outsourcing Document Archiving and Storage Solves Expensive Headaches for SMBs by JOHN MCINTYRE, THE IMAGING CHANNEL

14 Delivering Multichannel Support to the SMB Customer by LAUREN FORD, SQUARE 9 SOFTWORKS

18 Are Self-Limiting Beliefs Holding You Back? by BRAD RODERICK, TONERCYCLE/INKCYCLE

22 Marketing Has Changed Forever — If You Blinked You May Have Missed Itby DAVID CUMINGS AND JOHN M. ZINDAR FOR THE IMAGING CHANNEL

26 Questions Small Businesses Should Ask When Selecting Printers by STEPHANIE DISMORE, HP INC.

30 Applications Your Dealership Should Be Usingby LINDSAY KELLEY, PROSPECT BUILDER

34 Channel Chat: The SMB Customer

IN THIS ISSUE

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Volume 7, Issue 3theimagingchannel.com

from THE EDITOR


Proposed logo revision, 07/2010, EH

PUBLISHER & EDITOR-AT-LARGE Patricia Ames

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Amy Weiss

SENIOR ANALYST John McIntyre

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Kevin Craine

STAFF WRITER Ericka Gordon

ART DIRECTOR Susan Kidwell

WEBMASTER Chris Paschen

REACHING THE STAFFStaff may be reached via e-mail, tele-phone or mail. A list of contact informa-tion is also available online at http://www.theimagingchannel.com.

E-MAIL: To e-mail any member of the staff, please use the following form: [email protected]

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The Imaging Channel is published six times a year by BPO Media. Inquiries, back issue requests, and address changes: Email [email protected] or mail to: 840 S. Rancho Dr., Suite 4-558, Las Vegas, NV 89106

©Copyright 2016 by BPO Media. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Reproductions in whole or part prohibit-ed except by written permission.

The information in this magazine has not undergone any formal testing by BPO Media and is distributed without any war-ranty expressed or implied. Implementation or use of any information contained herein is the reader’s sole responsibility. While the information has been reviewed for accuracy, there is no guarantee that the same or similar results may be achieved in all environments. Technical inaccuracies may result from printing errors and/or new developments in the industry.

Media Kits and Reprints: Direct your requests to [email protected]

I’M JUST RETURNING from Kyocera’s FY 17 dealer meeting as I’m writing this let-

ter and putting together this issue on the SMB customer. Factored together, these things have given me plenty of food for thought.

As I was reading through the Channel Chat responses, a comment from Muratec’s

Jim D’Emidio struck home immediately as something I’d been talking about in my wrapup of the Kyocera event. He says, “It is important that dealers have a strong services offering to maintain the loyalty of their hardware customers. … As copy and print become less important to the SMB customer, dealers need to have additional offerings to increase revenue and margin.”

This is the crux of what I took away from Kyocera — and, quite honestly, most of the dealer meetings and other OEM events

I’ve attended over the last couple of years. And really, it holds true for all custom-ers — large enterprises that are digitizing volumes of data as well as the SMB that is trying to do more with less.

This issue is filled with advice and toolsfor the latter category — information on marketing and social media, advice on choosing hardware, and best practices when it comes to outsourcing document archiving and storage.

Additionally, as I mentioned earlier, we have our extremely popular Channel Chat feature, in which some of the industry’s best minds offer their own words of wisdom on the unique challenges and op-portunities presented by the SMB.

The world has changed, and with it the needs of the customer. Are you up to date on the needs of your SMB customer?

Amy Weiss, Editor-in-Chief

DAVID CUMINGSis the founder of VisibilityCorps Ltd., and is based in New York and Edinburgh.

STEPHANIE DISMORE

is vice president and general manager, U.S. Channels, at HP Inc. In this role, Dismore is responsible for leading and managing all aspects of HP’s commercial and consumer channel sales in the U.S., spanning distribution, national solution providers, regional VARs,

public sector, and SMB partners in the commercial channel, as well as retail partners in consumer electronics, offic product super stores, regional retails, e-tail and specialty channels.

LAUREN FORD

is the marketing communications manager and dynamic voice behind Square 9 Softworks. Delivering highly effective messaging across reseller channels, end user communities and

outside agencies, Ford develops, drives and executes communication plans that effectively support Square 9’s overall marketing goals and objectives.

LINDSAY KELLEY

is president and co-founder of Prospect Builder. She has experience in the execution of integrated marketing campaigns, inbound marketing, digital marketing, traditional and social strategies including social selling strategy, content strategy, and website builds.

BRAD RODERICK

is executive vice president of InkCycle Inc. He is an industry veteran with more than 25 years of sales and marketing experience. He is an active member of the imaging industry as an author, trainer and speaker.

JOHN ZINDAR is an international business advisor with the board services firm IntegralBoard Group, Inc., and is based in New York, Berlin and Panama.

contributors

BPO Media strives to be an environmentally friendly company. Please help us by sending address corrections

or removals by email to [email protected].

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June 2016 9

CAN’T LIVE WITH ‘em, can’t live without ‘em – the documents and records your business runs on (what did you think I meant?), and the need to process, store, and archive those documents and records for a variety of different reasons. While small businesses have been quick to embrace digital technologies to reduce costs, speed up business processes, accomplish more with less, and meet the digital commu-nications requirements placed on them by customers and regulators, many have a dark shadow lurking over their operations: thousands of archived pages of paper files an their continued reliance on those archives for many business transac-tions. Some small businesses, while operating on mostly digital docu-ments day to day, persist in printing a lot of pages, and often still rely

as much on the manual filing an storage of printed documents for archival purposes as they did in the pre-digital era.

For a small business owner, digi-tizing that growing row of file cab -nets always seems like a terrific ide — but the idea usually goes on the back burner while fighting today s fi es and closing that big account. Michael Miller, solutions architect for Fujitsu, a leading scanner solu-tions provider, explains, “The bulk of [small and medium businesses’] ex-penditures typically go toward costs in real estate, office fu nishings, and equipment, with document scanning as a ‘to do.’ Often, they see docu-ment scanning as one more process to implement instead of viewing it as a way to simplify the burdensome processes that they already have to deal with.”

One major reason why business owners don’t take the initiative to digitize their paper files is the seldom comprehend the real or “hid-den” costs of keeping (and adding to daily) those iconic file cabinets. Those costs include statistics such as:• On average, according to scan-

ning solutions provider Visioneer, it costs $5 to file a paper doc -ment, and then $20 to find it late .

• According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, a com-pany spends $25,000 on average to fill one five-drawer file cabi and an additional $2,100 a year to maintain that cabinet.

• AIIM reports that 3 percent of pa-per documents get misfiled, whil 7 percent get lost completely; it costs $120 in labor to find a mi -filed document, and $220 in labo to reproduce a lost document.

Outsourcing Document Archiving and Storage Solves Expensive Headaches for SMBs

BY JOHN MCINTYRE, THE IMAGING CHANNEL

McIntyre_0616TIC.indd 9 5/23/16 1:40 PM


Miller summarizes the costs of staying with paper: “When you look at the costs of not going digital, you have to factor in the time it takes to process and file pape documents, the cost to find lost o misfiled documents, and the cos to store documents long-term. In some professions like health care, duplicate documents and records can represent costly errors.” Dave Doucette, VP of capture for Novitex, says, “There have been a lot of good benchmark [research] studies … that have measured and under-stand the cost of owning a docu-ment through its lifetime … such as filing it, maintaining it, putting it i

a [storage] box.” Those indepen-dent research studies help service providers and business owners calculate the ROI of a records digiti-zation project.

The Impetus to DigitizeEven if most business operations and transactions in small compa-nies are digital, it is not uncommon for them to maintain paper file either out of habit or because they believe paper records are necessary — so the problem keeps growing. Just as in the other operations of their business, digitizing any paper files and a chives makes good busi-ness sense, but most small busi-nesses haven’t taken that step yet. Eliminating paper file-based er ors is a key goal, says Miller. “The main reasons to digitize paper are to reduce paper storage, and all of the manual and human errors associ-ated with it, as well as to improve access to the business critical data embedded in that paper,” he says.

Understanding and listening to the customer is critical, says Doucette. “The first step in th process is … understanding how you use [the paper records], why you use it, why you keep it … how the business operates, how it be-haves.” A side benefit, he explains is identifying what files to get rid of “We can help them identify what they don’t have to keep, what can they destroy now, what can they destroy next year.” Doucette re-counts the moment during a recent site visit where the client finally u -derstood that they didn’t really have a storage problem: “He told me ‘we have a printing problem … we are

addicted to printing,’ and thus, all of the aftereffects of managing and dealing with that paper.”

According to Mitch Taube, co-founder, president and CEO of New York and New England-based Digiscribe, it can be very hard for a small business owner to let go of their paper files. “ e run into that [mindset] every day,” he observes. “The triggers that cause many small (and medium) businesses to look at digitizing their paper records come from both inside and outside the company. Major business events, such as an audit, a move or reloca-tion, downsizing, an acquisition or merger, a sale of the company, or a significant lawsuit all fo ce a company to have to deal with their paper files and a chives.”

Cost of physical space is always high on the list of motivators to digitize, says Doucette, though he is quick to add that “security and con-trol of those records — frequently mandated by compliance standards

— are important also. [Business owners] read about a competitor that has a security breach, or one of their employees walks out with a fil … or a company that gets sanc-tioned … and that raises the whole concept of security and control,” he says.

Fujitsu’s Miller observes, “The pressure to digitize is twofold: internal cost/resource savings and increased productivity for a competi-tive edge, and external security and compliance statutes. Industry, state and federal regulations affect SMBs, as they must comply with the laws just as large enterprise-level organi-zations do.”

Compliance with government reg-ulations is a major trigger for looking at digitization in many vertical indus-tries, Miller says. “For example, all health-care organizations must fol-low the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) act, all financial o ganizations must comply with Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and all government agencies must comply with the Freeze the Footprint act, no matter how small of an organization they are.” Miller cautions all busi-nesses, “It is important to note that no industry is exempt from regula-tory compliance,” and adds that the ability to secure data becomes more and more critical for SMBs in indus-tries that produce and collect large amounts of private data, such as personal health or credit information.

“A lot of small businesses don’t grasp the concept that they are subject to the same laws and regula-tions … that apply to companies one hundred times their size,” says Novitex’s Doucette. “The same

Digitizing any paper files and a chives makes good business sense, but most small businesses haven’t taken that step yet.


June 2016 11

outsourcing document archiving

[compliance] laws that apply to General Motors apply to the small distributor with 40 employees.” He notes that small business owners shouldn’t feel completely singled out in their challenges, however. “There are a surprising number of enter-prise-level organizations that are still challenged by this [issue],” he says.

When faced with a problem or obstacle such as cabinets of old and unwieldy paper files, many smal business owners — a DIY lot with a strong belief in their own ability to “get it done” and a penchant to control internal processes (or save money) — can be easily lured into launching an internal project to scan reams of files. Of course, the e is nothing inherently wrong with that approach, but most small compa-nies don’t have large IT staffs — or any IT staff at all — with competency in image capture and processing, tagging, indexing, categorization and reliable archival data storage prac-tices. The investment in an internal imaging/scanning capture system requires a significant capital expe -diture, not including the cost of staff to train, operate, support and man-age it properly, and a secure space to perform the function. Fujitsu’s Miller remarks: “When it comes to document scanning, they (SMB) need the same type of technology in their capture solutions that enter-prise-level businesses do, yet they don’t often have the same budget or IT capabilities of larger corporations. … They need to work with manu-facturers and solution providers who have resources to assist them in the implementation, deployment and

support phases of their document scanning processes.”

If the firm is storing a doc -ment in the first place because it i important, then properly scanning and storing those scanned images so they are usable and accessible when needed is important also – any business that has had to endure a

sales tax audit or the like will vouch for that. Consider: a five-drawer fi cabinet, at 2,500 pages stored per drawer, represents 12,500 pages to scan – not including any document that contains duplex content. Such a task is not for the faint of heart. Taube notes, “They think simply buying a scanner and getting some college students or interns to image the files is the answer … terabyte of [scanned] data don’t matter if they can’t find what they need. Doucette calls what those kinds of well-intentioned but ill-equipped projects produce “digital landfill.” H adds, “[Small businesses] just don’t have the [technical] expertise … to take on a project like that.” As with other IT infrastructure projects and processes, small firms have to ely on the expertise that dealers, service providers, imaging consultants and VARs offer, whether they decide to scan in-house or outsource the process to a professional docu-ment scanning and imaging service. “Unfortunately, we get called in to clean up a lot of [in-house] disas-ters,” says Taube.

The Learning CurveSmall business owners are rec-ognized as a no-nonsense and pragmatic lot, so when it comes

to digital scanning and archiving, it helps if they are realistic about their staff resources and capabilities. Digiscribe’s most effective sales tool, says Taube, is showing prospects the exact details of the document preparation, scanning and indexing processes — how Digiscribe does what it does. “Once they see what

it really takes to do this properly, they don’t want anything to do with it,” he comments. He also explains that for documents to be stored and later retrieved effectively, the scan-ning process can require knowl-edge of the document content and classification for logical a chiving. Users also greatly underestimate the proper document preparation process, a facet that is critical in en-suring a clean and usable document scan and one that requires training and judgment.

“Show them the results,” says Doucette, which makes under-standing the benefits very clea . Outsourcing scanning tasks re-moves the complex document imaging responsibility, along with its inherent risk, from small busi-ness office teams — a g oup that may already be under pressure from multiple deadlines and priorities, and focused on serving the company’s customers.

A small business with numerous field-based employees conf onts a simple physical productivity issue: paper-based business files a en’t readily or cheaply available to those workers, forcing them to return to the office or equest someone else to search the file cabinet when the need historical information about an

When faced with a problem or obstacle such as cabinets of old and unwieldy paper files, many small business owners can be easily lu ed

into launching an internal project to scan reams of files

McIntyre_0616TIC.indd 11 5/23/16 1:41 PM


account. In the evolutionary scale of information storage, relying on a filing cabinet is the equivalent o using a floppy disk in a competitiv world embracing the distributed data access of cloud comput-ing. Fujitsu’s Miller remarks “The cloud is becoming more and more popular and a very efficient tool fo SMBs. As more SMBs embrace BYOD and remote employee de-ployment, the cloud provides a way for everyone to access the docu-ments and data needed to perform their duties anytime, anywhere.”

Digital information technology is a transformational force that has revolutionized almost every aspect of how we do business daily. Putting the apparent costs of everyday paper use aside, businesses of all sizes face real business data storage problems that have to be addressed:• Security. Let’s face it, paper isn’t

a very secure medium for sensi-tive data storage. Paper records can (and do) walk out the door, get copied/scanned, get lost/misfiled/misplaced/unintentio -ally shredded, or doused with Jimmy’s coffee. File cabinets, even with locks, aren’t really se-cure – they rely on erratic human behavior such as everybody mak-ing sure they are locked when they are supposed to be or that unauthorized staff don’t get their hands on access keys. Compare those risks with digital, encrypted and off-site cloud storage, where complete system monitoring of who accessed what files an when they did it are readily avail-able to management.

• Cost. If there are any arguments about the comparative costs of storing cabinets of paper records (on your site or in external storage) versus the cost of maintaining digital files with either in-hous storage or in the cloud — there aren’t any serious comparisons.

Digital is vastly cheaper, and get-ting even more so every day.

• Disaster recovery. You can store paper records in safe external facilities (not for free), but the superior safety of digital files in th cloud is about as safe a proposi-tion as any other available. This is another one that is not a close comparison.

• Instant access. Anytime, any-where cloud-based storage ca-pabilities reflects the ha d reality of business in the 21st century; file cabinets a e 17th century technology at best.

• Compliance. Digital, cloud-based storage records are better able to meet compliance regula-tions, security regulations, and drastically reduce the cost and pain impact of any potential busi-ness audit process.

• Generational considerations. While small business owners are 50.3 years old on average, many of their younger employees (mil-lennials) don’t like dealing with paper — consider these statistics from a Western Union survey:• 21 percent of millennials have

never written a physical check to pay a bill.

• 30 percent of millennials use

apps and mobile tools to make bill payments and view state-ments, and 43 percent use apps to view bills and transaction histories.

Paper archive records may feel comfortable and familiar to a 50-year-old small business owner, but their employees are the people most likely to be dealing with those records. Usually, those younger employees don’t like – or “get” – the paper para-digm, and yet business owners rely on those employees to make their company run.

A small business owner may be understandably daunted and fearful of a project to digitize cabinets of company records – but the poten-tial costs and risk of an exhaustive audit of paper files, the liability an legal cost risks of non-regulatory compliance, a loss of sensitive paper information to a competitor, or an unforeseen disaster such as fi e or flood, all a e serious and pragmatic business reasons to take a hard look at working with an outsource service provider to finally get rid of all tha old paper. If you are a small business owner, we are guessing you’ll be glad you did, and you won’t be one of those owners who has said, “Oh how I wish I had.”

resourcesVisioneer, When Less is More: Migrating from Paper to Digital Documents

http://www.visioneer.com/company/news/documents/lessismore-migratingfr

ompapertodigitaldocuments.pdf AIIM, Document Management: What is it and why do you need it?

http://www.aiim.org/Research-and-Publications/Research/White-Papers/

DM-what-is-it-why-you-need-it#sthash.pmzGkfIe.dpuf The Paperless Project

http://www.thepaperlessproject.com/the-impact-and-inefficiency-of-paper-

in-the-office/ Cost of Storing Paper

https://www.nd.gov/itd/services/records-management/cost-storing-paper


Freedom of Choice

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June 2016 15

IT’S TIME TO get serious about your small and medium sized business (SMB) customers. You closed the initial sale – great – but it shouldn’t end there. SMB customers are frequently look-ing for that differentiator that will allow them to compete in a larger marketplace. Providing continu-ous support to SMB purchasers will have a tremendous impact on their overall business strat-egy, while encouraging addi-tional sales opportunities for your company. By helping the SMB customer find ways to operat more efficientl , they can free up resources that will provide them with the edge they’re looking for. To maximize success in the SMB market, consider the following four areas of support:

Grow With the SMB Customer: The use of document technology has helped to level the playing field between SMB an enterprise organizations. Have you considered adding a solutions suite to your portfolio that will

evolve with the SMB customer as they continue to grow? Document management software does just that. But deciding on the right one? Well, that takes a little more consideration. You’ll want to offer your customers a product that will always be fresh; a solution that will provide multiple updates and new feature functionality every year. This allows your SMB customer to gain your trust, keep-ing them ahead of the technology curve. With a scalable solution in place, the SMB customer can handle a growing amount of work in a capable manner without bulky installs or drastic changes to their existing implementation. Integration capabilities are also a plus, as they accommodate an SMB customer’s current busi-ness environment. Additionally, the scalable sales model allows customers the flexibility to ad on purchases as needed, so there’s always an opportunity for additional sales. In a smaller market, businesses need to better

address specific needs as the arise. Replace solutions that only larger organizations could cost justify with a product that can scale to any size.

Deliver an Educational Experience: The ultimate goal of the SMB customer is gaining a significant eturn on investment. The fastest way to recognizing ROI with a software investment is through customer training. To cre-ate real business outcomes (and ultimately business return) you need to provide training that your customers will find value in. ou’ll need to identify the right kind of training, addressing the needs of not just your customer’s com-pany, but the individual user. Look for online training and on-premise options, encouraging custom-ers to attend. Training has the power to impact your customer’s business development in a posi-tive way, so position it that way! Gaining these new skills that are crucial to success in their spe-cific ole provides credentials that

Delivering Multichannel

Support to the SMB CustomerBY LAUREN FORD, SQUARE 9 SOFTWORKS

Square9_0616TIC.indd 15 5/23/16 1:47 PM


set them apart in their industry. You’re not just teaching features; you’re providing the knowledge that will arm your customers with success. Creating a feedback channel between you and your customers will enable you to keep them at the forefront of every new product deployment. Attend a course yourself. Be the success story. Show your customer the outcomes from attending training from the initial stages of learner satisfaction through knowledge improvement, behavior changes and final esults.

Take Care of the Technical Side: In a recent CompTIA report, more than 28 percent of small businesses and 43 percent of

midmarket businesses have become more dependent on technology in the last 12 months. SMBs are more apt to explore technology that will give them new capabilities. Just like larger companies, SMBs are interested in deploying innovative technol-ogy products, such as mobile, cloud, and analytics to improve customer success. But let’s face it, while the SMB market is more inclined than ever to use infor-mation technology, most are not prepared to deal with today’s complex and rapidly changing IT landscape. They simply lack the vast IT teams of their enterprise level competitors. This lack of ex-pertise is actually great news for you. It presents the opportunity to work with your SMB customers and provide them with the techni-cal support they need. In the VAR

channel, the best way to compete with IT consultants is to become more focused on business out-comes, rather than functionality optimization. With that said, today more SMBs go to channel part-ners for IT support, based on the quality of services they provide and their understanding of busi-ness. Resources are limited in an SMB scenario, so if a customer can invest in your business for technical support that would have otherwise required a back-offic hire, it frees up resources for revenue-generating activities.

Work on Your Website: As sales move to digital, interaction costs are lowered – critical for winning in the SMB market. To

harness the power of digital, com-panies need to optimize their sites to deliver value and profits ac oss three key phases of the decision journey. The website is particu-larly important because so many SMB buyers like to research and make final decisions on their own Many want to decide how and what to buy, prior to any engage-ment. So why not make it easy for them? Provide robust search capabilities, easy site navigation, and the benefit-rich content the need to decide if your solution is right for them. It’s best to leave feature heavy content for the demo stage. Don’t ignore social media, either. Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites have large com-munities of users who are able to quickly offer up a point of view that is effective in shaping a small business owner’s decisions.

Your company needs to build its website in a way that makes it easy for customers to connect to these communities and search for product information. Once the customer has purchased your product or service, the website continues to play a powerful role in supporting them. Features such as self-service support, online user groups and technical tip videos enhance the value of the product. These can be powerful tools for keeping that customer coming back. Your website needs to sit at the center of your mul-tichannel strategy if you want to remain relevant to your SMB cus-tomers and capitalize on future opportunities.

The SMB sector is the key growth area for many service providers. In today’s digital world, you won’t be competing on price alone, but on good cus-tomer experience and innovative product offerings. To differenti-ate against competitors, you’ll need to identify ways to deliver a more compelling experience to SMB customers. Start at the very beginning of the sales funnel and provide guided and interac-tive support throughout the entire process. This is the best strategy for profitable g owth.

contributorLauren Ford Square 9 Softworks www.square-9.com

Today more SMBs go to channel partners for IT support, based on the quality of services they provide and

their understanding of business.

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YOU’RE A REVENUE generator. Your company is relying on you. Your team is relying on you. Your family is relying on you. Your cus-tomers are relying on you. But who or what are you relying on?

A quick litmus test of market conditions gives a strong indication that you’d better not be relying on the market to make things easier for you. Are you relying on your company for leads? That’s cute. Maybe you’re relying on “that big deal” to close. Maybe on the latest sales gimmick or marketing magic. How is that working?

Winners rely on something different than non-winners. They rely on themselves to do the work. This is not an arrogant, over-self-reliance, aka, “The to-tally self-made man/woman.” Top achievers have the mindset that, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.” The problem we face with the “I can do it!” message is there is quite possibly part of you that doesn’t believe it, and it’s the part where your beliefs reside — your brain. Whether you can or you can’t will, in large part, depend on your be-liefs, because your beliefs drive

your actions. Your beliefs are at the heart of the “one thing you can rely on.” Believe you can’t, and you won’t. Believe you have what it takes, and you do — or you will after perseverance and sweating through the effort.

“Hey, Brad,” you say. “I know all this ‘positive attitude’ stuff and it sounds great but I haven’t seen the success I want. What’s the deal?” I get it. I truly do. I’ve been there. Read all the books. Gone to the seminars. Listened to the tapes and subscribed to the blogs. I dug in, hunkered

Are Self-Limiting Beliefs Holding You Back?BY BRAD RODERICK, TONERCYCLE/INKCYCLE

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June 2016 19

down, stayed focused, played the affirmations and still didn t see the breakthrough I was prom-ised. I gave up. And then I dove back in, looking for whatever it was I was missing. I decided that there was no quitting. And along came a friend who planted a seed — a seed that grew and ultimately revealed the answer. Not some esoteric, “go to the mountains and meditate” thing or “spend $20k to sit at the feet of some master” thing. This was an answer that is easy for anyone to understand (otherwise I never

would have). It’s an answer that is based in science, research and study — a study of “self-limiting beliefs.”

What are self-limiting beliefs? Any belief that holds you back from the success you desire and are willing to work to obtain. Notice that these are beliefs, they are NOT facts. Beliefs are: “I will never achieve … I am too old to … I can’t … I am too ____ to ever ___.” Facts are facts: “I am not going to be a NBA superstar.” That’s a fact for several reasons. I lack the required skill and I have

zero desire to put forth the effort to even try. Given these facts (no skill and no desire), any belief that I would have about being a top NBA star isn’t a belief, it’s a delusion. Do I have beliefs that can’t be backed by facts? Probably. But in this article, we are looking not at general beliefs but specifically at self-limitin beliefs.

Each day, many times a day, we choose between inspiring, affirming beliefs and self-limitin beliefs (or we just roll with old, false beliefs). We choose to look



toward the future or remain an-chored to the past, to a set of past beliefs that were not necessarily ever true in the past and certainly don’t need to be true in the future. Richard Bach said, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.” In other words, spend time telling yourself you can’t, and you won’t.

Perhaps you have heard of the “Bannister Effect.” A common myth holds that prior to 1954, it was a widely-held belief that it was impossible for a human being to

run a mile in less than four min-utes. I apologize for ruining a great story with facts, but there appears to be little to no evidence that this “widely-held belief” existed. Roger Bannister certainly didn’t have this belief. He believed that he could indeed run a sub-four-minute mile, and he put forth the effort to do exactly that. Further, he intention-ally chose a specific day with itsspecific weather conditions tomake his attempt. Shortly after his success, others quickly began running sub-four-minute miles. Bannister himself indicated that if he hadn’t done it, soon someone else would have.

In an article about beliefs and self-limiting beliefs, why do I ruin what has been one of the most often-told examples of limiting beliefs? Because the importance of this story is not what others believed, it is what Bannister be-lieved, combined with the knowl-edge that there was no factual ba-sis for believing a sub-four-minute mile could not be run. He believed he could do it and then he worked

like crazy to do it. His belief led to actions that pushed him forward versus beliefs that could hold him back (limiting). He focused on what was under his control, his thoughts and his efforts instead of what oth-ers did or did not believe.

There can be any number of self-limiting beliefs and you will need to take time to come up with those that you own. For some generic ideas that may come up within the sales pro-fession, here are a few that are heard with frequency:

• Our leads are never any good.• Cold calling is nothing but a

waste of time.• I never get through to the right

person.• It takes me 10 tries before I ever

reach someone.• I will never be top rep.• I’m too ____ to ever _____.

Beliefs become decisions. Here’s what Matthew B. James, Ph.D., says in Psychology Today about those decisions: “However they come to us, these limiting deci-sions run our lives and they prevent us from becoming who we wish to become.” Let’s look at those beliefs above and see the resulting actions.• SLB: Our leads are never any

good. Action: I won’t try.• SLB: Cold calling is nothing but a

waste of time. Action: I won’t try.• SLB: I never get through to the

right person. Action: I will give up.• SLB: It takes me 10 tries before

I ever reach someone. Action: I have already given up.

• SLB: I will never be top rep. Action. No reason to try or struggle.

I highly doubt that if Bannister were in sales, he would have said, “These leads suck. Nobody ever closes these.” He would more likely have said, “I am thankful that someone has pro-vided me with some contacts to help speed the process. The re-sult is up to me. Time to contact them.”

Harvard University professor Ellen Langer puts it this way: “When you think ‘I know’ and ‘it is,’ you have the illusion of know-ing and the illusion of certainty.”

If you are going to tell yourself something that your brain begins to accept as “knowledge and certainty,” why not create new beliefs that propel you forward instead of holding you back?

If there is anything that you will need to rely on, anything that you can rely on, anything that you have to rely on, it’s your beliefs. They either serve you or you serve them. Beliefs either draw closer and closer to your ulti-mate success or push you further and further away. What beliefs do you need to change today? What facts can you replace them with? Facts like, “I will work hard enough and persevere long enough to succeed.”

Let’s kick off a season of killing self-limiting beliefs!

There can be any number of self-limiting beliefs and you will need to take time to come up with those that you own.

contributorBrad Roderick TonerCycle/InkCyclewww.inkcycle.com


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MARKETING HAS CHANGED FOREVER — IF YOU BLINKED YOU MAY HAVE MISSED ITBY DAVID CUMINGS AND JOHN M. ZINDAR FOR THE IMAGING CHANNEL

THERE IS GOOD NEWS: the digital age affords the opportunity to exponentially raise ROI on mar-keting expenditures and to deliver unheard of revenue and growth. Although most firms a e slow to embrace the opportunity, big gains are available for the early adopters of new thinking in digital marketing.

Wait — aren’t most firms already heavily engaged in the digital world? Most spend money on sophisticated websites, e-commerce, online advertis-ing and SEO, as well as the many other specialisms of new

marketing. Social media icons are proudly lined up on business cards — a lens, an “F,” a tube, a tiny blue bird.

All the tools are there, but the bad news is, unless they are co-ordinated into a logical and trans-parent process that is focused on tracking progress toward stated goals, the digital opportunity is lost and confusion can reign.

What, Still No ROI?What does all this engagement do for firms? How do they tracktheir spend performance — their

ROI — on dedicated capital and labor? The answer is the same as it was before anybody knew what a Google Adword was — nobody really knows. The famous lament of Viscount Leverhulme more than a century ago resounds even louder since the advent of digital:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half!”

The co-founder of Unilever would be appalled at the state of marketing today. He would see even more resources being

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MARKETING HAS CHANGED FOREVER — IF YOU BLINKED YOU MAY HAVE MISSED ITBY DAVID CUMINGS AND JOHN M. ZINDAR FOR THE IMAGING CHANNEL

shoved through even more dispa-rate channels. There is little focus in the new, highly variegated digi-tal landscape; rather, the goal is to cover as many bases as a bud-get will allow — a form of “spray and pray” for the 21st century.

Despite the many processes in place, ROI generally remains unknown and its potential is untapped. This shortchanging is especially burdensome for small and medium-sized firms tha struggle to remain relevant with each new trend in social media or big data dump. In this crowded barnyard environment, chickens without heads come to mind.

Does Anybody Really See You?So how does a firm, especially onethat can’t lavish money on an army of marketers spraying and praying across fast-moving digital targets, deal with the traditional black hole of marketing, now deeper and more mysterious than ever?

You might be thinking, “but I already have an SEO program in place and now I just have to keep building a better website.” But if SEO delivers traffic that bounce or fails to engage, then it either delivers the wrong audience to your site — or delivers the wrong presentation to the right audience.

Your potential customer is not on your website right now, and the chances of them being there any time soon is remote unless you build a strategy to make yourself visible to your target au-dience in the places where they are right now.

Why is all of that money spent on flashy websites when it is th last place that these people are likely to encounter your offer-ings? The truth, as it often does, hurts. An expensive website is like a billboard on the long desert stretch between Vegas and L.A. — destined to be ignored at high speed.

Happily, with the correct focus, firms can tu n processes with

unknown outputs into a sleek approach that increases revenue flows while validating the marke -ing efforts behind the surge.

Visibility First — Inbound Marketing on SteroidsTo deliver sales, offerings must be visible to the target audience and presented in a manner they find compelling. The g eater the visibility, the greater the sales. Accordingly, the corporate culture needs a new mantra — visibility first, moving the cultu e beyond obsessions with websites and the tiny blue birds of the outbound world.

We start with a basic fact: People exist right now who want what you have to offer. These people could be down the street, or on the other side of the globe. But they really do want your product or service right now.

The problem is that these peo-ple have never heard of you. It is your task to make yourself and your offer compellingly visible to these people. Make yourself vis-ible to the right people, and your revenue will naturally increase.

Hence, relevant visibility is di-rectly proportional to revenue.

Visibility is the core of inbound marketing; be found by your cus-tomers rather than spending lots of money and effort trying to fin them, the marker of traditional outbound marketing,

Firms need to set up the frame-work to be found by their cus-tomers. By adopting a visibility first app oach, they can do this in ways that deliver both revenue and meaningful ROI.

The Visibility-First StrategySo, how to adopt a visibility-firstapproach to marketing?

It begins with setting some objectives. How much money do you actually want to earn this quarter? Get these financia objectives written down and nailed to the wall for everyone to understand.

And who is going to put that money in your bank account? This requires a process of de-tailed audience segmentation and the creation of some workable buyer personas. This will start to tell you about the things that keep your customers awake at night. You need to understand their emotional pains. And even more important, you need to understand how your product or service will solve those pains.

The visibility-first strategy i based on an inbound content approach. This uses influencer to place relevant and compelling content in front of your target audience where they already are looking. This is not advertising. You are not selling anything in this approach! Rather, you are offering up content that helps the audience understand and solve their pains.

This only works if one teaches, not sells. If you do, customers will find you. Outcomes can b astonishing. Most importantly, the effectiveness of the inbound ap-proach can be measured in ways that outbound advertising and publicity can never be — revealing an ROI on your expenditures that is both very efficient and pleasing

This is why a visibility-first a -proach makes sense. Thinking in visibility terms broadens hori-zons, taking the business on a journey outwards from its website and penetrating the digital ge-ography of its customers, where their pains and desires reside.

And you must be visible there, where they are. That is where your customers’ critical aspi-rations are revealed. Visibility allows a better understanding of a target audience that now has no idea who you are or what you have to offer.

Get Your Business to the GymOnce a firm commits to a visibility-first app oach, it needs to be visibly fit. It s time to take the business (or at least the sales and



marketing team) to the gym on a regular basis to check the fitnessof the processes that contribute to visibility. It can be a long, detailed process — but here are the high-lights of the simple questions sales and marketing need to answer:

BUILDING A HARD BODY OF FACTUAL OBJECTIVESDo you have documented busi-ness and sales objectives, and if so, what is the end-to-end pro-cess by which these objectives are to be achieved? How does each pot of marketing expendi-ture fit in this objective-focuse process and what is the ROI that you need to deliver?

ACCUMULATING CUSTOMER KNOWLEDGEWho are these people and what do you know about them? Do you have buyer personas for them? Have you conducted a detailed audience segmenta-tion? Specificall , how does your product or service speak to what keeps them awake at night? Does your offer really solve their pains? And what about their goals and aspirations? Are you communi-cating how you’re going to help deliver them?

EDUCATING AND ENTERTAIN-ING TO BE COMPELLINGAre compelling propositions being created that speak directly to the emotional needs of the customer? Create the right content and your offerings will start to walk out of the door as your new customers are pounding at it. Is content being created that carry these proposi-tions to the target audiences? Are you thinking like a publisher and creating content that truly helps your customers? Are you teaching, not selling? As inbound thought leader Seth Godin says, “content

marketing is the only marketing left.”

HARNESSING INFLUENCERS TO ENGAGE CUSTOMERSAre there mechanisms to get your content to the places where your customers spend their time? Are you finding and befriending th people who already have the eyes of your customers? Are you am-plifying your content by harness-ing the power of those influencer to take your message directly to your target audiences? Are you prepared to deal with any organi-zational pushback on giving all of this content away for free?

This last question bears special attention — the correct answer is critical to making the transition from old to new marketing. The purpose of putting out content for free is to capture leads. Again, this is not about tradi-tional sales. Leads are generated when you have taught, not sold something. You have gained the audience’s trust and respect for your expertise. It is sales without selling.

MAKING YOUR DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE FIT AS WELLIs your digital infrastructure capable of doing that? It is an essential part of being visibility fit — is it? Can you captu e leads? As leads flow in, a e you adopting an inbound sales process to score, qualify, validate and then nurture them?

SETTING METRICS AND CALCULATING ROI — NO EXCUSES HERE!Are you setting and constantly recalibrating metrics that fa-cilitate measuring and report-ing? Can you observe the direct proportional relationship between

visibility and revenue, where the ROI comes from? Have you stopped spraying and praying?

When all the questions are answered correctly, the firm i visibility fit — and a evamped marketing process is ready to be implemented.

Campaign-Led ImplementationFinally, it’s time to become visibil-ity focused. This involves taking a campaign-based approach to amplifying the visibility that has been created. It’s creating new content each month according to objectives suited to individual customer segments. And it’s releasing that content in conjunc-tion with the power of influencers This disciplined, ongoing ap-proach creates a feedback loop that continues to validate and deliver traffic, leads and evenue.

It’s a ProcessSo marketing has changed forev-er, and so have the business pro-cesses needed for ambitious firm to deliver revenue and growth.

To deliver excellence, busi-nesses need to be rewired to focus on how visible they are to their natural audiences. Doing so can deliver hitherto unseen mar-ket value in contrast to the old way of doing things. It is a very cost-effective process, especially for the small and medium-sized firm. As explained in some detai above, the process can be sum-marized in just six words: vis-ibility first, visibility fit, visibili focused.

contributorsDavid Cumings VisibilityCorps Ltd.John Zindar Integral Board Group, Inc.


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IT’S OFTEN REFERRED to as the rule of three — the principle that suggests that things that come in threes are more compelling, satisfy-ing or effective.

Whether we realize it or not, many people, when given three choices, have been conditioned to believe the one in the middle is often the best. Technology vendors keyed into this rule long ago, and it’s become almost standard prac-tice to bundle products and servic-es into three simple groups: good, better and best. Guess which one is most popular? The middle one. Most of us look at the entry level, good package and decide it’s sim-ply too basic. And because we’re always trying to curb spending, the high-end, or best choice could be more than we need. But that one in the middle? It often looks just right.

The trouble with this approach in a business environment is that it assumes the individual needs of every organization can

be adequately addressed with a handful of standardized product and service bundles. However, no two businesses are alike. Each has very specific equirements when it comes to technology. Therefore, in lieu of compromising with good, better or best, it would behoove small businesses to think in terms of best, best, best.

Nowhere is this more important than with printer acquisitions. Printers serve as central work-horses for most small businesses. And today’s printers are getting better all the time with engineering leaps that anticipate the needs of small business owners and deliver more and more amazing printing experiences.

Choosing the right print solution can provide a competitive edge to a small business by boosting productivity, efficiency and th professionalism of documents, all while saving time and money. So how does one determine which

print solution might be best, best, best for a particular customer? Start by helping them answer these questions:

1. Should a printer help boost business productivity and efficiencyThe short answer is “absolutely.” According to a recent global SMB survey1, increasing productivity is one of the top five business prior -ties cited by IT professionals. Yet few small business owners con-sider how their printers can aid in this objective.

To determine whether a printer might enhance productivity, examine the role it will play in the organization. Very small businesses printing about 500 to 2,000 pages per month can get by with a more basic machine – so long as it’s reli-able. On the other hand, high-vol-ume businesses printing more than 6,000 pages per month will want a more robust multifunction printer

Questions Small Businesses Should Ask When Selecting PrintersBY STEPHANIE DISMORE, HP INC.

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June 2016 27

(MFP). Help your customers under-stand the differences between the fundamental product features, such as speed, quality, and reliability, but also look closely at whether the MFP can perform various tasks concurrently (some can only handle one job at a time). It is also impor-tant to scrutinize how networking and online capabilities vary among printers. In the digitized world, this last point will be increasingly im-portant for growing companies be-cause a connected printer enables a variety of services and solutions to help manage and optimize the printer’s capabilities.

2. How can a business determine total cost of ownership (TCO) for printers? We tend to think about printer costs in terms of what we pay at the register. We know what we paid per device. We usually know how much we pay for replacement ink and repairs. But few customers

have a solid grasp on what each printer costs during its lifetime.

Not all printers are created equal, and TCO can widely vary. Many printing vendors provide a cost-per-page analysis, and you can fin multiple third-party comparisons online. In addition, there are a vari-ety of tools to help calculate printer TCO for a specific business; th gapTCO Report is one example. To better understand how to estimate TCO, industry pundits suggest multiplying the published costs per page by the estimated number of pages the business prints on an annual basis. Then simply add these amounts to arrive at the esti-mated total cost per year. Multiply that by the number of years the business plans to own the printer, and then add the purchase cost.

3. How much printer speed does the business really need?When evaluating small business needs, it’s helpful to know that the

minimum speed for inkjet printers is approximately 20 ppm in black and white and 11 ppm in color. Laser printers will produce black-and-white pages at approximately 26 ppm. Performance rises with more industrial-strength printers, but adding speed doesn’t necessarily have to break the bank.

4. Should security be a concern?This seems like a question with an obvious answer, but the question itself isn’t actually that simple. If a printer operates behind a fi ewall (there’s most likely one in the local Wi-Fi router), then it should be about as safe as any other device on the local network. However, if the printer is connecting to the internet without the added protec-tion of a fi ewall, then additional security management precautions could become necessary.

Fortunately, many vendors are doing their part to boost security

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via sophisticated security capabili-ties integrated into both the printer hardware and software, offer-ing additional managed security services as add-on options. These add-on options can include threat detection software, data encryption technologies optimized to protect document exchanges, reporting capabilities to comply with govern-ment regulatory reporting require-ments and consultations with experts who can help businesses develop a customized security management plan.

5. Are the environmental aspects of printers important?If it’s easy and cost effective to choose printers that will help reduce your customer’s carbon footprint and the amount of plastics in landfills, why not do so

It’s fairly painless to be environ-mentally responsible today. Many leading printer vendors offer printer cartridge recycling programs where materials are separated, refine and blended with other recycled plastics that are used in new print-ers and cartridges.

When helping your customers select a printer, spend a little time discerning which vendors offer the most environmentally friendly machines and prioritize those with progressive sustainability programs. Your customers will be happy you did.

So what’s the most critical take-away for your customers after they examine their printer needs more closely?

Most businesses have truly cus-tomized needs, but may not know how to identify the right printing

solution required to fully optimize productivity and cost savings. They may not have realized that a best, best, best approach even exists. By seeking out the best features with the best functionality and best ser-vices, small business owners can enjoy printers that go beyond basic printing services and contribute to the bottom line, ultimately providing the best result possible.

1 Enterprise Strategy Group’s 2015 Global SMB Technology and Business Trends

contributorStephanie Dismore HP Inc. @hpbiznow

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IT’S HARD TO run a small busi-ness. As a small business, we know that well! As a provider of marketing services to office tec -nology dealerships, many of them also considered small business, we also see it secondhand. Many employees do double duty and we’re always looking for any edge we can find to help us be mo e productive and improve how we do business.

There are many, many technol-ogy tools and applications that can help. I’ve selected a few to

cover in this article that your of-fice technology dealership ca use to improve your productivity. All of these products are free to use, although some do have paid tiers for additional functionality.

WordPress https://wordpress.comMost folks think of a website when we mention WordPress. While you can certainly build your website using WordPress (there is a large pool of providers there), I’m talking specifically about ordPress as a

blogging platform. And you should be blogging. If

you aren’t, start. Companies that blog grow web traffic mo e rap-idly than those that don’t. More importantly, they gather more leads, faster, than companies that don’t blog. Briefl , here’s why.

Your blog should be an answer machine. Your service techs and sales reps get asked questions on a daily basis. Answer those questions as blog posts. Why? Today’s prospects are about 57 percent of the way through their

APPLICATIONS YOUR DEALERSHIP SHOULD BE USINGBY LINDSAY KELLEY, PROSPECT BUILDER

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June 2016 31

buying cycle by the time they engage with you. Google is their source of answers, and Google is an answer machine. Use your WordPress blog to answer those questions (and use good basic SEO, like keywords) and you’ll begin to establish your dealership as an authority. More questions answered equals more author-ity equals a greater likelihood of becoming an online and trusted advisor to your prospects.

Sounds good, right? You can create a free WordPress blog in seconds.

Go to https://wordpress.com/ and select the center op-tion, “Start a Blog.” From there, WordPress will walk you through a setup wizard.

Evernote https://evernote.comEveryone takes notes in meet-ings. And then they remain in the individual’s notebook or as a Word document in their lap-top. Wouldn’t it make sense to be able to collaborate and share each other’s notes after a meet-ing? We thought so too, so we all connected to each other in the Evernote platform. What’s Evernote? It’s a collaborative ap-plication for note taking.

Sign up for a free account and have your coworkers do the same. Then you can share “notes” and “notebooks” with en-tire teams. So if your internal ac-counting department typically has a weekly meeting with a scribe taking notes, instead of taking those notes in Word and sending around an email for everyone to save in a random folder on their personal drive, you can have a notebook shared by the account-ing team with different “notes” for each weekly team meeting. These can all be accessed in the cloud by anyone, anywhere. Evernote is cloud-based so users can ac-cess it from their computers or an app (both Apple and Android). Access at any time without taking

up company server space with duplicate content.

MailChimp http://mailchimp.com/As far as email tools go, this one takes the cake. MailChimp is an email marketing tool that allows small business owners to easily upload their customer and pros-pect email list, lay out a profes-sional email using pre-designed templates, and send an email com-munication to their databases.

Quick note: We recommend that you segment your email database based upon buyer persona and customize your message so that it is relevant to your target. Blanket emails with the same message to your entire database will likely result in high opt-out rates and will be ineffec-tive in generating conversions.

The best part about this tool is that for dealerships with smaller lists, the tool is completely free. As your database grows, costs kick in, but it’s a great way to scale your email marketing as your business grows. If you’re sending under 12,000 emails and have an imported subscriber base of 2,000 or less, the tool is free.

Hootsuite https://hootsuite.comSocial media gets tossed around the copier dealer marketing world a lot, usually without really under-standing how effective social can be as a piece of your marketing strategy. At the core, using social media is a way to show a more human face to your customers and potential customers while estab-lishing you as a trusted resource.

Use social channels (such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook) to talk with your customers and share useful information – tips on growing their business (tying in your product/ service as appro-priate), local happenings that may impact your audience, and edu-cational articles that (again) focus

on how your product or service might make their lives better.

Hootsuite makes this easy. Using Hootsuite, you can share to Twitter, LinkedIn (you can even publish to groups you’re a mem-ber of), and Facebook from a single dashboard (and the phone app is also easy to use). You can monitor, publish, schedule, and interact with your local custom-ers and even global experts. Not having to log in to each social platform individually to manage your social publishing is a critical time saver.

The monitoring feature is a great way to keep track of Twitter lists and core keywords important to your business. You can create tabs for as many streams as you want to monitor. Want to share an informative blog article about how to spot toner pirates on your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts? Do it from Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a social media one-stop shop!

Canvahttps://canva.comWhen posting a blog or sharing a tweet, images can make a huge impact in how people interact with your message. Research from Xerox reveals that colorful visuals will increase a person’s willing-ness to read a piece of content by 80 percent. Canva allows you to quickly and easily create beautiful images to accompany your blogs and social posts.

It has preformatted templates for all the different social media channels – no need to guess at the size to make the header of your LinkedIn long format post. Find or upload an image (if you fall in love with a Canva image, most are only $1), add it to the template, add any text you’d like, and then download. The basic functionality of Canva is VERY simple to learn and use. You can also use the tool to design posters, infographics, presenta-tions, custom headers for email templates (that you can upload

APPLICATIONS YOUR DEALERSHIP SHOULD BE USINGBY LINDSAY KELLEY, PROSPECT BUILDER

Kelley_0616TIC.indd 31 5/23/16 1:56 PM


to use in your MailChimp emails), flyers — basicall , if you need an image or design, you can use Canva.

Pablo https://pablo.buffer.comCanva is awesome, but if you need an image fast (my record is about 45 seconds), Pablo is perfect. We like to add words to images – a teaser for a blog post, a quote, etc. – and Pablo is the

easiest tool we’ve found to do this. Log in, load your image (or use one of theirs or a blank back-ground), add a quote, and down-load. It really is that easy.

Slack https://slack.com Slack is our team’s favorite tool. You may have even seen the TV commercial for it now. It’s a team communication solution with a ton of functionality (it’s similar to Yammer, which you Microsoft users may have heard of). At its core, it is a chat collaboration tool that you can segment into differ-ent channels by team, topic, client, or whatever you choose (we have an internal channel designed for random conversations).

For instance, if you’re work-ing on a project to integrate your CRM with a marketing automa-tion platform, you can have a channel created inside of Slack to have discussions, share docu-ments and then easily go back and find conversations. e have a channel for each of our clients. That way, as we’re building out lead generation campaigns for

clients, we can chat about those campaigns in the appropriate channel, keeping it neat and organized.

Channels can be public or private. Direct messaging others keeps one-to-one questions that other team members don’t need to see out of the main conversa-tions. Slack can be downloaded and used as an application on your computer or you can log into it through a browser. As team

members send chats, notific -tions can pop up and alert you that a team member has asked a question or posed a comment. It’s easy to share files on Slack Drag and drop into the appropri-ate channel to instantly share with the folks subscribed to that channel. What sets Slack apart from other instant chat tools is its ability to integrate with other sys-tems. For example, if your mar-keting team wants to know when a new subscriber signs up via MailChimp, a simple integration between Slack and MailChimp can create a popup alert notifying the team. Google Drive is another useful integration.

Slack also has a handy video chat tool. Type the command into a channel and you’re hav-ing a video conversation with a co-worker five seconds late . It’s fantastic for regular meetings and quick check-ins.

Google Drive https://google.com/driveFor sharing documents, Google Drive is hard to beat. It’s free to store up to 15 GB and ties easily

into Google Docs, so you can collaborate by writing and edit-ing online. We use it as an online archive to ensure that everyone on our team has access to all client documents from wherever they are. If you have an Internet con-nection, you can access Google Drive. For a small business, it can even be an alternative to using Microsoft Office (though we don t actually recommend that).

Skype https://skype.comWhile Skype can be used for group collaboration and one-to-one mes-saging, we prefer Slack. However, to communicate with customers with a quick ad-hoc call (video or just voice), especially when you want to do screen sharing, it’s a lot easier than having to set up a GoToMeeting event.

There you have it; nine free tools that you can use to give your marketing efforts a boost. No tool – free or paid – is a sub-stitute for a plan. The best tool in the world won’t save an incoher-ent marketing plan. However, if you do have a great marketing plan in place, but lack budget, the nine tools on this list can help you successfully execute that plan. Good luck!

contributorLindsay KelleyProspect Builderwww.prospectbuilder.net

No tool – free or paid – is a substitute for a plan. The best tool in the world won’t save an incoherent marketing plan.

Kelley_0616TIC.indd 32 5/25/16 9:07 AM

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What is one of the most important lessons you’ve learned from working with the SMB?Matt Chretien: They are focused on the tactical re-alities of growing their business with many demands on their time. These pressures create a mindset and culture with low to no tolerance of complexity of any kind. If a simple, clear, and quick time-to-value isn’t apparent in a five-minute conversation, nothing happens.Jim D’Emidio: Many SMB customers are similar to dealers: Some among them are family-owned businesses, and many times, relationships and who they’re doing business with is as important as price. These SMB customers like doing business with local companies that have roots in the community. They tend to look for value, not just lowest cost. These SMB customers are not always on the cutting edge of technology, but they will adapt new tech-nology as it becomes commonplace in the business community. BTA dealers do very well with SMB customers because of the relationships they form.Brandon Gross: Among the many lessons I’ve learned in working with SMB clients, not underesti-mating their potential has been the most valuable. Time and time again, I’ve revisited SMB accounts to learn that they have doubled or tripled in size and outgrown their current solution. This means more products, more sales, more revenue, and the con-sistent opportunity to consult as a trusted partner. Jeanne Hopkins: That they have way too much to do and are inundated with requests for time – “just 10 minutes” — and no one has lots of “just 10 min-utes.” SMB leaders are always interested in growing and learning new things. So, it is a dilemma – how do you learn about new tools, technologies, sys-tems and workflows unless you take those calls?Mike Johnson: One of the most valuable lessons we’ve learned is that it is a chance for us to have leverage in the marketplace through our partners. Our partners have the sales resources and “feet on the street” to reach more opportunities and partici-pate with the Lexmark brand than we could directly. You have to have partners to reach those clients. We’ve learned that our partners have excellent

Channel Chat: The SMB Customer

Matt Chretien,

President & CEO,

Intellinetics

Jim D’Emidio,

President,

Muratec America

Steve Feldstein,

Director Product

Marketing — SMB

Laser & Scanners,

Brother

Brandon Gross,

OEM Channel

Manager — MBA,

Access Control

Devices Inc. (ACDI)

Jeanne Hopkins,

Senior Vice

President & CMO,

Continuum

WHAT ARE THE highs and lows of working with the SMB customer? We decided to find out by asking few questions of some industry leaders, giving them the opportunity to answer some or all of the ques-tions, and not surprisingly, they had some interesting insight on what makes the SMB tick. Our panel this month:

Mike Johnson,

Vice President

North America

Business Channels

& SMB, Lexmark

International

Matt Smith,

Vice President

Printing Solutions,

Samsung

Americas

ChannelChat_0616TIC.indd 34 5/25/16 9:19 AM

June 2016 35

channel chat

relationships with the SMB clients sometimes last-ing more than 10 or 15 years. We see that and it is something that is very compelling to us. Matt Smith: No question that SMB customers live up to their reputation of responsive, nimble and scrappy organizations, but the most important les-son I have learned in working with them is that they work together as a seamless organization when it comes to learning. They love to talk, share best practices, share pricing, share what didn’t work, share how they won customers and lost customers, and how they reinvented themselves. You need to treat each SMB as a potential entry point to a large organization that is bigger than the largest enter-prise account.

What new technologies do you see being adopted by the SMB customer?Chretien: We are seeing more and more interest in cloud technologies, particularly cloud document management solutions. The cost of maintaining your own infrastructure combined with the SMB’s lack of internal IT competency is accelerating the trend.D’Emidio: Although SMB customers are generally not early adopters to technology, they are adopting technology at a rapid pace that will streamline their businesses or reduce costs. Dealers have found additional revenue by providing services like man-aged print services, managed document services and managed network services. Many dealers have been very successful in adding these services to sell to SMB customers, and it is important that dealers have a strong services offering to maintain the loyalty of their hardware customers. It is also important that dealers continue offering relevant and unique solutions to their customers. As copy and print become less important to the SMB customer, dealers need to have additional offerings to increase revenue and margin. Technologies such as IT ser-vices, 3-D printing, color label printing and security monitoring services will help dealers expand their offerings to SMB customers.Steve Feldstein: Through conversations with our customers and channel partners, we understand SMB customers are concerned about mobility and security. Given the increased use of tablets and smartphones among employees, cloud and mobile enablement is increasingly important to SMB IT decision makers as they want to support employees wherever they are. Print devices with mobile-friendly features such as “print-from” and “scan-to” capa-bilities are important features needed to help keep

mobile employees productive.To support workflow in the SMB environment,

which can still be very paper-intensive, businesses are adopting multifunctional devices that have solution-integration and business-class functions. More SMBs need to interface with electronic work-flow systems, such as Electronic Health Records (EHR) solutions, and multifunction devices serve as critical input/output posts in the workflow process. As such, we see increased adoption of print/scan/copy/fax devices and solutions that enable end users to share information quickly, securely and cost-effectively.

Interestingly, SMBs also look for eco-friendly office technology. Device features, such as duplex printing, Energy Star-rated devices, and high-ca-pacity consumables are in high demand; deep sleep and auto power-off modes also help reduce energy consumption when the device is not in use.Hopkins: The concept of a CRM system is one that is needed … needed in order to communicate to existing clients or customers as well as prospects. Being consistent in content creation and developing a cadence is so critical. Smith: SMBs adopt technology like consumers: they want their technology to match their personali-ties and unique characteristics. This is actually why I believe Samsung is so well aligned to support SMBs as we believe in open architecture and ecosystem partners that customize our hardware to match the needs of the market. With our Android tablet interface, my 16- and 14-year-old children can build an app or create a custom workflow to match their desires. This is the power of the Android open eco-system that aligns with the responsive, nimble and scrappy attitudes of the SMB customers.

Are there any unique challenges when it comes to selling to the SMB?Chretien: Low appetite for capital investments, no patience with long sales cycles, limited change management or “process” maturity and difficulty in “stepping off the hamster wheel” and providing true mindshare to engage in a meaningful conver-sation about their business strategy, goals, and challenges.Gross: A challenge in doing business with SMB clients is showing value. Will SMB clients spend money? Yes. However, they are typically more in tune with how much they are spending versus their enterprise competitors. ROI and overall value are key.



Hopkins: Time. A lack of time.Johnson: How do you reach the customer? That’s really the unique challenge. How do we reach the customer through our partners? We do a lot of work from a solutions perspective. We’ve focused a lot on leveraging a mobile platform that our partners can use so they can better understand the value that we can bring, and then communicate that value to the SMB customer. It starts the conversation — we want to make sure we are training the reps to ask the right questions.

The best solutions that Lexmark has created have started right at the customer. They don’t start in a room in Lexington – they start at the customer level. We’ve really tried to learn how to apply our resources best to deliver value – that’s where the solution starts.

The OEM/provider/hardware landscape is going through drastic changes — what effect do you think that will have on the SMB customer?Chretien: I think SMB buyers will continue to be presented with solutions that offer ever-increasing business value, with simple and clear investment models, i.e., a per-user, a la carte managed service approach that continue to make it easier and easier for them to focus on growing their business and jet-tison the rest to a trusted partner.Feldstein: Quality, reliable products and a strategy to support the end user before, during, and after the sale is now more critical than ever. SMBs are also demanding end-to-end solutions that can be customized for the workgroup and the business. Reliability, expandability, and product support will become more significant factors in the decision-making process.

Increased reseller training and support through authorized partner programs are becoming more important, as well as extended warranties and dis-counts of genuine supplies.

SMB customers are looking to OEM/provider/hardware manufacturers for efficient workflow

solutions. This includes scan-to-cloud/print-from-cloud capability, smart MFPs with solution integra-tion (including cloud apps), and the ability to cus-tomize device operations to meet business-specific needs. For SMBs in the K-12 education vertical, compatibility with student assessment technologies such as Scantron, Global Scholar, Eduphoria, and EduSoft is critical. Similarly, hospitals running elec-tronic health record (EHR) systems such as Cerner, Epic and Meditech need compatible devices for printing and scanning.Hopkins: More focus on a single vendor to support multiple needs. Smith: The market is changing, but not as fast as everyone likes to believe. You don’t have to be bleeding edge, but you should be a fast follower. My direction to SMBs, and to any customer, is to NOT lock yourself into anything for more than three

years. You should also be willing to spend more to get a nimble solution, one that will adapt to a changing market and landscape. From a Samsung perspective, it is easy to say, stick with the largest companies with the largest balance sheet, which is self-serving. I think it is more important to pick manufacturers who are able to adjust with the mar-ket at record speed. Adjusting to changing markets should be the No. 1 attribute that customers of all sizes should consider.

What are the main differences you encounter when working with the SMBs versus enterprise customers?Chretien: Human and financial capital, IT compe-tency, experience, infrastructure, process maturity and change-management abilities.Hopkins: Faster decision making due to fewer people making [the decisions], but risk-averse due to the expense.Johnson: The SMB customers have less scale, but you also see less politics generally with the smaller customers; they move with more speed and they are more willing to take risks. Usually we can get to the issues that are holding the businesses back

SMBs are demanding end-to-end solutions that can be customized for the workgroup and the business.


Your total guide to the evolvingoffice technology landscape.

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with the SMB customer a lot quicker versus the enterprise customer. A lot of the best practices that we have developed have been driven by our SMB customers and then passed along to our enterprise customers because our SMB customers are willing to participate in pilots and take more risks. Their participation allows us to have more intimate knowl-edge about their businesses versus some enterprise customers.Smith: The main differences that we have encoun-tered when working with SMBs versus enterprise customers are in experiencing cutting-edge technol-ogy. As a company that likes to bring new technol-ogy that is disruptive to the market, it needs to be experienced more than explained. I can explain about a tablet interface on a new copier that utilizes the power of the Android ecosystem or harnesses the power of the mobile phone to a mobile workforce,

but the real power comes when an end user walks up to the machine. They aren’t sure how to use it for the first 10 minutes, but then the magic happen when they realize it isn’t just a copier. I have seen the moment happen over and over with a simple question that they ask me: “But can it do X?” Once they realize the answer is yes, they follow up with “well, what about Y and Z?” At that moment, they realize the power of a disruptive product. The issue is that it is much harder to give thousands of SMBs this experience than it is with enterprise customers that are centralized with structured hierarchy.

What would you say are the top IT challenges facing the SMB customer?Chretien: Security and compliance remain at the forefront for most SMB owners; however, main-taining the infrastructure to support the busi-ness while staying within the budget is always challenging.D’Emidio: The difficulty for both dealer and SMB customers is determining which direction is the best for the future. Many SMB customers do not have full-time IT or CIO personnel. Therefore, their IT strategy is based on a variety of initiatives

implemented by the owner, or part-time IT re-sources. The SMB customer does not have the IT understanding to develop a strategic IT implemen-tation or future direction. Dealers that can offer IT support and virtual CIO can help the SMB customer develop and implement a future IT strategy. Dealers can do this by partnering, building or buying this IT knowledge. New technologies, such as cloud-based IT services, can also help dealers to offer additional IT services. The future of SMB IT services will be hosted in the cloud: SMB IT services will be offered as a monthly recurring revenue utility model through the dealer, and dealers will manage print and copy at the SMB location. All other IT services will be cloud-based and the SMB customer will have mobile and thin client products.Gross: Sufficient IT infrastructure and resources are a common challenge with SMB clients. For

our industry especially, everything we sell requires connectivity. Coaching the SMB client through the process of expanding their network infrastruc-ture to accommodate our solutions isn’t uncom-mon. Working with outsourced IT is also common. Patience goes a long way here.Feldstein: Budget constraints and flexibility are the top challenges today. Decision makers are operat-ing on tight IT budgets – which are often flat from year to year. This requires the flexibility to explore and unlock the underutilized value in solutions across the network. In many cases, this can involve integrating new multipurpose/multifunctional de-vices with existing IT infrastructure and better evalu-ating total cost of ownership of MFPs and printers over the life of the device.

Equally important is network security. IT profes-sionals are always looking to deploy the highest levels of security to ensure that information is only seen or accessed by the people intended. Devices that offer integrated NFC card readers and/or support smart card technology provide walk-up authorization or user authentication. Locking down network access points and deploying secure release functionality for print jobs and access to

Dealers that can offer IT support and virtual CIO can help the SMB customer develop and implement a future IT strategy.



other device functions supports enhanced security efforts. Also, network user authentication also pro-tects against unauthorized access to the device to help protect information and help ensure regulatory compliance.Hopkins: Understanding the need for security and data backup.

What trends are you seeing with SMB customers?Chretien: Migration to cloud and willingness to acquire new service models if they are simple to con-sume financially and operationall , and are worry-free and from a partner they trust.Feldstein: There is an urgent need to continue innovating, and keeping up with the competition, despite flat budgets. SMBs a e harnessing business intelligence and analytics, driving more efficienc into the business. Faster connectivity, mobility, and cloud-based solutions are increasingly becoming key enablers for these initiatives.

The influx of millennials in the workplace has als changed printing needs. While they are less likely to print some documents for environmental reasons, millennials are more likely to print critical information for records such as legal, human resources, and sales content.

To meet these needs, SMBs are seeking cost ef-ficient solutions to sha e and store data, rapidly and cost-effectively via mobile and cloud applications. This includes faster, more productive A4 size printers and MFPs that securely improve workforce productiv-ity and promote collaboration. Johnson: We see SMB customers seeking a deeper relationship with their partners. They are asking their partners to deliver more value. We are working closely with our partners to see how we can help them move from commodity transactions to working with the lines of business at the customers, where we can deliver more value. We want to ensure that we are giving our partners the capability to have these conversations and deliver solutions in those lines of business.

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