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Users aren't buying scanners any more

Editorial Type: Interview     Date: 01-2015    Views: 4088      





We speak to Erik Banis, whose Xerox Scanners business came almost out of nowhere to win the coveted 'Company of the Year' prize at last year's DM Awards, about how a scanner company can differentiate itself in a world where 'everybody builds good scanners'

David Tyler: We can't really talk about Xerox Scanners without mentioning your big win at the end of last year, when you came away with 'Company of the Year' at the DM Awards 2014. What has that meant to you - and indeed your customers, prospects and partners?
Erik Banis: We were certainly not expecting to win the Company of the Year Award at all! As you know, while the Xerox brand is of course very well known, Xerox Scanners had really not been actively communicated or marketed into Europe until relatively recently. From that perspective, bearing in mind that we really only started to change that less than two years ago, we were really thinking of ourselves as the 'new kids on the block' when it came to the DM Awards ceremony. We'd done a lot of promotion in advance of course, and we were quietly hopeful of maybe getting some recognition on the product side - but we really didn't expect to be Company of the Year.

This win is something that we're incredibly proud of, and we're using it wherever we can to help support our messaging, in the UK and internationally. Obviously Document Manager is primarily a UK-based publication, but I can tell you now that there are lots of people out there checking out your online content from outside the UK and getting a lot of value from the articles.

I've been talking to key decision makers within some very large organisations, for example multinational airlines, and being able to talk about this win - especially with some of the other big names who were in the running - can really help to get their attention. It will, I'm sure, have a positive influence over time on a number of our sales cycles. So yes, it's definitely been good news for us to have been part of the awards.

DT: You say that the Awards win came as a complete surprise - what do you think influenced the readers' voting in your favour?
EB: I don't think there is a single straightforward reason for our win; it's a combination of everything that we are focusing on as a business. We've made a lot of changes, introduced a whole new set of messages to the market. And perhaps crucially, our focus is absolutely not on the hardware - anyone can make scanners, after all. We have combined excellent hardware with the right software and services offerings to create a powerful message. I think that proposition helps us to be seen as different.

Scanner hardware is no longer a sensible way to try to differentiate: a few years ago there was a massive difference in quality between good, intermediate and frankly bad quality hardware. That is simply not the case any more: Fujitsu makes excellent product, so does Kodak Alaris, so does Panasonic - and so do we of course. There is no such thing as 'bad' equipment any more in our market.

What a lot of people maybe don't appreciate is that users don't buy scanners. They buy solutions to a business need, something that has to be integrated into business-critical processes and applications. That is where we are focused. Customers can see the benefit of that approach; because of course it means we are much closer to their business needs in the first place. It also helps us to ramp up our sales channels, and to better integrate with the direct sales teams we have within the wider Xerox organisation. It allows them to have a completely different conversation: they're not talking about 'feeds and speeds' any more, they're talking about the customers' business processes. When the focus shifts to the software, then really nobody cares whether you're talking about 25 or 45 or 145 pages per minute - it's no longer relevant at all.

DT: So is the focus these days more around helping with process issues, as opposed to a technology sale?
EB: There are times when we are talking to businesses that don't even realise that they have a problem that can be solved using our solutions. Sometimes we might explain a very specific integration that we might have done for another customer, and there is a moment of realisation: "You know, we should have done that. We also have a similar issue, but we never realised there was a solution." They might not even recognise that there is a problem with how they have been doing things, until they see that there are ways of doing things at a much lower cost, and/or with much higher rates of efficiency.



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