CRN Interview: Ricoh's 5 Big Bets For The Future

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With a new CEO for the Americas named in April, and Ricoh’s dealer-only tradeshow ConvergX happening in a few weeks, the printer company is charting the path ahead and the company is telling CRN its five big bets for the future.

Joji Tokunaga (pictured left), president and CEO of Ricoh Americas and Glenn Laverty, SVP of Ricoh Americas Marketing and CEO of Ricoh Canada said the printer business will be its biggest driver, but it will focus on making channel partners more efficient through data sharing to boost sales.

The office is still king.

Tokunaga: From the customer viewpoint, I have to say, the print environment is still big. So we'll continue to focus on that. The office environment will continue to be our key focus.

Laverty: It's not just new products. It's improved efficiencies for our dealer partners. which can, in fact, help them with their cost effectiveness and things of that nature that we’re focused in on. Whether that is in the form of supply chain changes that we would endorse, all the way to back-office capability or data sharing. It's things of that nature that we're planning on providing to our dealer partners.

Preparing to print what is next.

Tokunaga: In the future we are getting into textile printing, small label printing, 3D, that segmentation is going to be a huge focus for us.

Laverty: We've got some revolutionary products we're looking to bring to market in both channels and you'll see that in some specialized products, such as some wide format as well as the AnaJet product and things of that nature.

Providing better managed services than the competition.

Tokunaga: Third is what we call managed services, our onsite services at customers locations. This is a very unique opportunity for us because it's not just 'buy-sell', it's more of a trusted partnership and that partnership gives us the chance to show them a whole array of new services.

Laverty: Ultimately, we've generated a workforce that is unified in front of the customer. This is where I believe our competitors have failed or struggled. When a customer is interested in looking at whatever Ricoh has to offer, they don't want to jump around inside our organization. They want that customer relationship to be linked directly to that organization, to be responsible and accountable to delivery of those services and ultimately, the client exec becomes a portal into the rest of the Ricoh world, and brings the rest of the organization to the customer to execute.

Support the channel with vendor resources.

Tokunaga: In the dealer channel you need support. The dealer's capital is limited. so if they need to penetrate certain customers we need to support them. To me, it doesn't matter which channel it comes from, to me that's our dealer, to me it's a very important Ricoh customer. So we will continue to work dealer by dealer, and help them, depending on what they need. Some dealers want to get into the production print, but they don't have enough technicians, for example. We will procure that for them.

Reach the customer where they are.

Tokunaga: Lastly, we've already begun our journey, but a new way of touching customers in the world of digitization has been tremendously open. Myself included, I need to get better at it. I need to get much better at it. We still have quite a bit of work to do for Ricoh branding, so in spite of what we talked about, we're still well known as a printing company. So those are the areas I would like to focus on.

Laverty: When customers are searching for products, about 60 to 70 percent of the work is done by the customer by searching online, checking out references. Then they're essentially clicking on a button that says 'I'd like to know more.' What we do is nurture that lead and expand on the conversation. Once we're there we turn it over to our dealer partner in that particular area and they'll follow it through to its finish. It's sort of a SEO SEM approaches to marketing and allowing customers to find us and access us and then expand on their interests.