The money is in the toner, silly

“The resellers are sticking machines on the desks, but it is the stationer who is getting all the margin,” jibed Harman. “The trouble is that they don’t want to carry a whole range of consumables.” The best strategy he said is to pick one vendor and specialise on that one so you can stock the range.

Not everybody agrees with that strategy. James Rendell, marketing manager of printer consumables distributor Tonnex, suggests another approach for resellers wanting to grow toner sales.

Rendell said it’s better to stock the full range. He said resellers with a retail presence get a list of the fastest moving stock from the Tonnex account managers and start with those. Put them in plain view to prompt the walk-in customers. Send flyers out to your customers and do whatever you can to promote the fact that you stock consumables and never, ever say “we don’t stock that model cartridge”. If you don’t have the stock in store there are distributors such as Tonnex that can drop ship with a fast turnaround. Mostly people aren’t buying toner as an urgent requirement. Usually, explained Rendell, the low-toner light has been flashing at them for a week and they figure they better do something about it before it runs out completely.

For other resellers, Carmel Mosser, general manager, SMB and channel at Lexmark ANZ said there is a certain amount of transaction phobia among IT resellers who don’t rely on their retail presence. Items such as consumables are seen as small ticket and more trouble than they are worth, but Mosser warns them they are missing out on potential profits.

Getting a piece of the consumables action is a key strategy to making print a worthwhile business to be and, Mosser points out, print is one of the few IT products that has any sort of revenue annuity attached to it that goes on and on for years. Accessing that annuity can maximise the margin for resellers and by servicing the customer properly you can better lock in the next printer sale.

“Resellers are shy of transacting,” she said. “It is about not being afraid of talking about supplies. We train our resellers to ask a set of questions: Where do you buy your consumables? How do you buy them? Where do you store them? Often the purchasing patterns for printer consumables are disjointed with no clear demarcation of responsibility. If the customer is willing to centralise and order everything through one account it can mean great cost savings for them and more margin for the reseller.”

In this day and age when the printer can email you to tell you it’s low on toner, there’s really no excuse for not being more proactive and preemptive about getting this business.

All that might be too hard for the average reseller who’s more interested in selling new servers, setting up networks or looking at moving into Unified Communications.

“They need to become creative in the way they sell the machines,” said Harman. One option is total fleet management such as the HP printer services mentioned above.

Harman said OKI has the management software to monitor the equipment, do electronic meter reads and generally assist in this sort of management process. But there are still risks and challenges and Harman has a few words of warning.

hardware in is money silly the toner