To sell enterprise-wide, start with a single process.

Nashua Ltd. makes massive strides selling BPM by first getting its foot in the door.

“Simplify your sale by addressing a single process,” says Ben Sheppard, Solutions Consulting Manager. “You make the capital outlay and risk to the customer so much smaller. Find their pain first – find the financial drivers within that process causing the pain – then start your up-selling. Then constantly re-visit and show your customer and other departments more features and benefits.”

This approach has landed high-profile accounts Petroleum Agencies of South Africa, Rand Mutual Assurance and Sun International since Nashua became South Africa’s largest Laserfiche distributor in 2007. Nashua enjoyed Winners Circle sales the last two years, on its way to the million dollar mark in ‘09.

“We’ve focused on horizontal business processes before we started attacking specific vertical markets,” Sheppard explains. “We got to know all the pains associated with AP processes, HR processes, etc. This is a very safe approach, as we could apply these processes into whatever vertical we find ourselves in.”

Nashua, coincidentally, is also South Africa’s largest Ricoh dealer, which creates Laserfiche opportunities that broaden Nashua’s revenue stream. “By integrating our software into the customer’s business processes, we can earn more of the customer’s IT and operational wallet – not only their printing revenue,” he says. “The cherry on top is that we are not bullied by the customer on pricing which is normally our biggest challenge.”

Then the account can be expanded into more products and professional services. Sheppard offers a recent example:

“Our sales manager pulls up a report of customers doing more than 10K prints a month and offers to come in – at no charge – to find out why they’re printing so much. Then we find high volume print processes and show that by implementing Laserfiche as a BPM tool, they will not only save on printing costs, but increase their efficiencies in the departments concerned. A major tip here is to win over the users who will benefit most from this efficiency, find out from them what would make their lives easier. Once you’ve addressed their immediate need, don’t complicate it – sell one process, then up-sell and earn money on professional services. We found that we had more profit by selling at a reasonable cost, and then earn ongoing revenue from professional services. In fact, the customer I’m referring to has subsequently grown into Quick Fields for scanning services, forms overlay, automated capturing with barcodes and POD return reports.”

Sheppard estimates bundled sales now account for about 20% of Nashua’s Laserfiche business. “We’re pleased enough with this early return that from here on we expect the benefits will pay off.”

Nashua was a natural to sell Laserfiche: its main office was its own best customer. “We started off by using Laserfiche in our own processes like POD’s HR and contracts,” Sheppard explains. “The model was then pushed down into the franchises to make everyone see the benefits and increase in efficiencies. Our sales and technical support staff were all trained at the same time.” The consultative selling, he’s found, is best split between tech support and sales staff. “Someone who can easily spot a process, properly document it with ‘drivers’ and build systems often isn’t as geared towards selling,” he says. “We’d rather train people up in a sales support role, and use them to support the ‘closers.’”

Because Nashua is so successful selling BPM solutions, Sheppard is especially excited about Rio and Avante.

“With Avante, we’re now able to sell features rather than users,” he says. “Traditionally we battled to justify modules like Workflow and Web Access. With Avante we found that we only have to make the customers aware of their own pains, and then show them how we’ll solve it. The ROI with Avante is very easy, but the trick is, as I’ve been saying, sell it into a single process, and then do up-selling afterwards.”

Workflow 8, of course, is all about automating single processes, so not surprisingly, Sheppard is excited about its possibilities. “The inclusion of Workflow 8 with Avante makes our marketing strategy easy,” he says. “We’ve actually created standard HR, AP, POD and other standard ‘Workflow Templates’ we sell with Avante, which we then sell professional services and training to customize.”

Customers, he says, are also inspired by Workflow 8. “We found customers running ISO Quality Standards can take business processes designed in Workflow 8 Designer, and use this as their ISO process in their ISO Management System. Change requests are done directly on Workflow 8 Designer.”

The future as Sheppard sees it, is Nashua pioneering BPM solutions in South Africa – even to non-Ricoh customers.

“Laserfiche and Nashua share a vision. We sell enhancement and streamlining of business processes – hence most of our recent sales included Workflow. We’ve try not so sell just search and retrieval solutions because archiving is an added advantage the customer will have automatically,” he says. “Our approach is that even if you don’t own Nashua equipment, Nashua will make even our opposition’s machines work better for your business with our solutions.”

Posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 9:30 am under VAR of the Month. You can comment on this post.