The following appears on cbronline.com
CBR spoke to Lexmark’s general managing director for the UK and Ireland, Danny Molhoek, and Chris Booth, sales manager for the UK and Ireland, about the company’s shift towards software solutions.
What are your roles at Lexmark?
I’m the MD for the UK and Ireland. I’ve been here since March. I’ve been working for Lexmark for about 15 years. I started out in sales, then they sent me to the East, so I’ve been managing central and eastern Europe and all the emerging countries.
Chris Booth: I’m Chris Booth, I have a responsibility for sales within our software solutions.
Can you tell me a bit about the Lexmark Solutions Centre?
Lexmark has probably existed now for 23-24 years as a company, from former IBM. We have been on a journey in this entire period. When I joined Lexmark about 15 years ago, it was an organisation that was delivering world class network laser devices to the marketplace, talking predominantly to IT. We made sure our products worked with almost everything that was out there.
We’re already at that moment in time where we’re vertically organised, trying to gain knowledge of industries; specific industries in the market has always been one of the key aspects. We’ve been starting developing our own solutions. Around the millennium started with the whole managed print services concept. Managed print services for us, even in those days, was not a price per click kind of contract, it was much more. And then we’re developing all of that, new software and solutions, and about three and a half years ago we decided to expand. That’s when we started to acquire software companies. The first one that we bought was Perceptive Software.
We believe that this is the right path forward for Lexmark, to make sure that we’re specialists in these various industries, in both hardware and software.
Apart from the Solutions Centre in London, how are you showing your clients that you are about more than just hardware?
There are multiple ways. Unfortunately we don’t have a hundred million dollar marketing budget! But we have various paths to market. We do a lot of investment internally with regards to our people. We take the opportunity to do the regular visits that we do with customers, where we have developed certain tools and presentations. But what has been working really well for us is that we set up meetings here in the city where we have customers coming in, on a specific subject, and we present to them, but we also have our customers presenting to them. We have three different formats that we use, we have managed print services dominated with a part of software in it, software with a part of MPS in it, and more a less an equal share. So there’s those three types, depending on the industry and where customers are in their thinking process. We do it on a very regular basis here. Because if customers take the time and effort to come over here, there is a lot of feedback after that.
Do you take a lot of customer feedback?
If you want to position yourself in the market, you can develop the most beautiful tools that you can imagine, but it will never work unless it’s synced with customer requirements. We do listen to our customers a lot. It’s not just listening to the customers, but it’s also making the investments to follow legislation. Talk the banks here
One of the issues that you hear with many companies is that they want to change and implement. If I show them a simple business process, they say great,. But they don’t have the staff or resources to do that, because we have that and we can do that for you. Everything’s going so fast but there are so many things that they have to keep into account.
What has Lexmark been up to in 2013?
From an internal point of view, I think the biggest milestone that we have is that we are integrating quite well.
