Little Rock, Arkansas-based reseller DataMax Micro has increased its sales 33% over this time last year, emerging as the regional leader in Avante deals.

Key to this success, says Brian James, founder of the Micro division of DataMax Micro, has been a sales strategy that leverages Workflow as a powerful business analytic tool that embraces Avante’s named-user licensing. “I like to present ourselves as business analysts,” James begins. “I explain how Avante gives you a specific user at application log-in with certain rights and abilities to be more accountable in the workflow that we design. That’s a big one when we talk to managers and owners who know deep down there’s a lot of waste – not just expense with couriers and file cabinets.”

It’s this sense of perspective he says – selling the impact of and investment in each empowered named-user within an organization – that can carry the Laserfiche message enterprise-wide.

“Even with Rio, we’re still keeping it simple, but in an enterprise presentation,” James adds. “I can ask, ‘If you can make [an employee’s] job more pleasant – how important would that be to your overall growth? What would be the efficiency, the productivity gains - for a single price - that would give your staff this feature set with Web Access, Audit Trail and Workflow.’ Well, you get all that - and document imaging, too!”

This empowered-user methodology has resulted in significant successes, most recently the Arkansas Supreme Court, Southeast Arkansas College (SEARK) and Conway Corporation, a growing municipality integrating Laserfiche with its GIS system (see “Sales Tip”). Each win, James points out, owes to lengthy periods of discovery and needs assessment that drill down to very specific pain points to be alleviated. In the case of the Arkansas Supreme Court, for example, state law mandated that all Court resolutions be made public record – which they were, in the form of massive leather-bound volumes. Jones found that $250,000 a year was being spent on printing and binding the volumes, and answered with a 10 user Avante system and a SMART Doc camera using PhotoDocs to capture the history of state resolutions with a Public Portal to make it all accessible.

With SEARC, the sales cycle took a year, but, as James found, the wait was worth it. “We started in their Records Department where most pain existed. In one month we tripled the amount of users,” he recalls. “We just implemented Workflow. Literally within 24-36 hours of their last training we had proposals on the table to double what we did – when the college comes up with funding.”

One of the advantages James’ team had working for it on the SEARK deal is that DataMax Micro is also a copier dealership. “When we have all cylinders hitting I can position new copiers and printers with Laserfiche and then bundle that with a printing solution to manage their prints,” he explains. “It’s a very, very unique umbrella – to cover imaging and printer needs, but then be able to talk about Laserfiche increasing productivity as well.” He offers an example: “SEARC had a budget to replace 20 copiers and printers, and I was able to go in and show them that, with those funds, we could not only do that, but go one step further with an imaging product and Workflow to track it all.”

Key to selling an enterprise-scalable solution, he says, is being able to set realistic goals and expectations. “I’ve seen other presentations where the reseller says ‘You deploy this and you’re going to get this.’ I concentrate on the single user. I’m going to tell them how much time I’m going to spend with each user to make sure they understand and use these features, as a way to guarantee that investment in the user,” James says.

“When people ask me to compare Laserfiche to other solution, I get ‘em away from comparisons and feature sets. I show them how graceful it looks, how simple it is to deploy and use, how it’s going to change the way their organization performs,” he offers. “’Let’s talk about what are we really trying to do – you’re going to have a strong foundation built on our imaging, and then training and a workflow that empowers that user to be their best,’” Jones says. “You can look at a hundred products and nobody’s going to tell them that.”

Posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 6:08 pm under VAR of the Month. You can comment on this post.