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BUSINESS SOLUTIONS
This year marks the 20th anniversary
of document management
company Invu. Founded in 1997,
the Northampton-based company
supplies a range of solutions
encompassing document and
content management, purchasing,
workflow, document automation and
collaboration.
It targets mainly mid-market companies
through a mix of direct sales, partners
and OEM relationships, principally with
IRIS, which supplies Invu Document
Management under the IRIS OpenDocs
brand to around 20% of the UK’s top 100
accountancy practices.
Invu CTO Stuart Evans says that as
the sophistication of its offering has
increased, referral partners have become
an ever more important route to market.
It currently has about 20 such partners,
who recommend Invu to deliver an entire
solution, from beginning to end.
A referral partnership, he suggests, is
a very good option for copier companies
seeking to build deeper relationships with
customers.
“Where there are copier resellers that
are trying to distinguish themselves with
a depth and a consultative nature in how
they deal with customers, being able to
bring us in to provide solutions works very
well. We have partners such as Azzurri and
Principal that do that for us.”
Evans adds that the benefits to the
referral partner are not just financial. “They
get a referral fee, which is a percentage
of the licences involved in the deal. But
there’s more to it than that. It lets them
demonstrate that they are adding value for
their customers. It also ties in the products
they have sold to customers in terms of
getting a deeper ROI delivery and greater
customer stickiness.”
Struggling with solutions
One of the advantages of working with
copier companies, says Evans, is that there
is very little overlap in skill sets, which can
complicate relationships with IT reseller
partners. This, he suggests, is because
despite paying lip service to ‘solutions’
many copier companies have failed to
make the transition to a new business
culture.
“The whole copier reseller market
traditionally has absolutely no culture of
customer care or business solutions. It
still sees a solution as a number of clicks.
They have made a lot of their money in
the last five to 10 years in selling print
management solutions, which is really
just another way of dressing up clicks
while selling less clicks. It’s not a business
solution.
“To sell business solutions you have
to have two or three things that they
simply don’t have built into their DNA.
First, you have to have the ability to listen
to customers and understand their needs
as a business, not just as people pressing
buttons. And you need to be able to deliver
into that, which means understanding their
other software systems; understanding
what finance systems really do; and
understanding what people want out of
those systems in their different roles –
what a finance director wants out of that
system, what an accounts payable clerk
wants out of it and what a regular person
in goods inwards wants to do with it in
James Goulding speaks to
Stuart Evans, CTO of UK
document management
specialist Invu, about the
company’s partnerships
with copier resellers and its
evolving product line
Bring in the experts
order to deliver a solution. I don’t think
those businesses traditionally have the
whole business model and engagement
model with customers to find that out.”
Division of responsibilities
While this might be seen as a negative,
Evans points out that it does mean there
is a clear division of responsibilities, which
can be helpful when partnering.
“We think copier resellers struggle
to deliver solutions; we also think they
struggle to let go of their tin and their
old business models. But for those that
want to [bring us in] and that recognise
the difference in skill sets and cultures
between our respective businesses, it
makes for a really good fit because there is
very little overlap.”
Evans adds the caveat that while he
is looking to recruit new referral partners,
they must be culturally aligned with Invu.
“It’s not like a club you can sign up
to in the hope of making more money.
It’s about being aligned in terms of how
you address customers and the types of
customer you have. [The referral network]
is not something that’s going to grow at
a huge rate. It’s something that we work
on in order to develop a larger sphere of
trusted businesses around us, rather than a
large volume,” he said.
They have
made a lot of
their money
in the last five
to 10 years in
selling print
management
solutions,
which is
really just
another way
of dressing up
clicks while
selling less
clicks
Continued...
