In the last year, Nancy Mathes of Paper-Lite has:

• Doubled her sales.
• Sold the first-ever commercial Rio system in her region.
• Built a loyal, vocal customer base.
• Pushed beyond her comfort zone to working with bigger solutions.
• Worked with her Laserfiche regional team closely in moving into the Business Process management model.
• Strengthened sales support and customer communications when Jessica Mathes joined the Paper-Lite Team.
• Laid a solid technical support foundation by signing on with varDesk.

What’s more, she’s done it in Indiana, an area hard hit by the current U.S. economic downturn.

So how does Mathes account for this significant success? By doing things differently, she says. “I made provisions for growth,” she explains. Jessica Mathes now handles customer support and has increased outreach with a monthly newsletter called “Lite News….Tools that work for you.” Jessica has a regular blog and also is re-working Paper-Lite’s website. “That freed me up to do what I do best – get in front of the customer,” Mathes says.

Nancy Mathes, Owner of Paper-Lite

She’s also contracted varDesk, the IT support service of Laserfiche reseller STG, which she credits with helping her land the first-ever commercial Rio installation in the Midwest, to the convenience store chain Circle K. “Having somebody who could build integrations and help with the migrations from 7 to 8 to Rio was really important,” she says, “I wouldn’t be able to have that kind of account without that quality of field support.”

The Circle K Rio sale is significant for two reasons: it represents the value of investing time and resources into existing customers, and also the evolution of a solution from storage and retrieval to ECM. “We started scanning their terminated employee files into an archive system almost 10 years ago” Mathes remembers. “Now we are integrating Laserfiche into their business processes.”

Mathes’ sensitivity to the cumbersome complexity of records keeping comes from the fact that she’s a former records manager herself. “I’m coming at sales through a record manager’s point of view. We don’t talk about software, we’re talking about their records, their livelihood,” she says.

With this approach, Mathes has built a very strong, very vocal customer base, one that’s kept her thriving despite the otherwise bleak economic conditions. The opportunities are out there, she says. “A new manufacturing customer saw how they could become more efficient and cut costs by implementing Laserfiche despite a down turn in their business due to the poor economy.”

“I think one of the areas we really need to focus on is e-discovery,” Mathes says. “In Indiana, e-discovery laws went into effect last year where attorneys have to supply electronically stored information,” she says. These new laws require a greater need for authentication and transparency that can more easily be met when utilizing Laserfiche as their document management system. Mathes believes that Laserfiche is that needed “key element” in meeting the many requirements in storing ESI (electronically stored information).

Even though Paper-Lite is a relatively small company, its thinking hasn’t been. “We strongly believe that you either have to make a commitment to growth and allocate the necessary resources or risk being eliminated as a viable document management resource in today’s complex business environment,” Mathes says.

Author Info

Laserfiche
Staff

Hobey Echlin is a Writer/Researcher in the Laserfiche Marketing department and is active in the Laserfiche Luminaries program.

Posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 1:18 pm under VAR of the Month. You can comment on this post.