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<p><span style="font-size: 30px;"><strong>Unicorn</strong></span> /ˈjuːnɪkɔːn/Noun1.&nbsp; &nbsp; <br><br>1. A mythical animal typically represented as a horse with a single straight horn projecting from its forehead.<br><br>2.&nbsp;Something that is highly desirable, but difficult to find or obtain.<br>"An album like this is something of a unicorn"</p>
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<figure class="wp-block-image"><img src="https://staging.selectec.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CS-bundle-boxed-unicorn.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-6865"/></figure>
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<h3 style="text-align:left">Picture this...</h3>
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<p>It’s the start of another sales period for your business. You’re established, you’re successful, but, like any forward-thinking business, you know that markets are changing. You know that to stay ahead, growth is key. The problem is that your market is static, every pound you capture is one that you have to win from someone else. </p>
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<p><br>You also need to stay relevant to that market; there are so many examples of businesses that have simply tried to step too far from their core skills and had the enterprise fail. Remember when Dell decided to make MP3 players? No? Nor do many other people. Finding new products and services to offer your customers that are supportive of the services and products you already deliver is a smart move - it’s the foundation step to ‘diversify and survive’ change.</p>
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<h3 style="text-align:left">Managed Print Services is in this exact state</h3>
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<p>New-to-market business is rare, most customers in the MPS market are not new to managed print services. Very few dealers are finding their margins increasing or the market price of their products getting stronger. Page volumes may still be stable or offer small increases, but the importance of print declines across the board and as it does, the supporting product commodities and associated margin opportunity decreases as a result.<br></p>
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<p>Resellers immediately find themselves in a commoditised, commodified situation again. One of several quotes on a desk with the same logo of the same software they are presenting. Of course, each reseller has their own value proposition, but it never helps to support a stronger price if the same product is offered by multiple vendors.<br></p>
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<p>Here’s the bind. A reseller needs to find a strong, well-developed product. It needs to touch and answer all of the current trends in the market. It needs to be well supported, after all, this is new ground for many partners, at least in terms of an active approach. It needs to be commercially strong, and have marketing support and the case history to encourage customers to have confidence in their choices.<br></p>
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<p>Many managed print resellers look for other office services, such as Telecoms, Furniture, or IT Services with varying success. While these offerings are within the same ballpark, it’s still a stretch to bring them to the table with the same strength as the management of paper and - more specifically - documents.<br></p>
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<p>The most obvious product set to explore is that of document and business process management. Bustling under a million acronyms and titles lies a set of software and hardware tools that are directly related to the skill sets of Managed Print resellers - dedicated document scanners, capture applications, Enterprise Content Management software, even E-Forms and Signature solutions.<br></p>
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<p>All of these products are driven by the very processes that Managed Print resellers have been perfectly supplying for decades. In fact, no other businesses are best placed to truly understand the needs of the humble paper user than the MP reseller market. They understand the steps a business needs to take in order to shift its data and documents.</p>
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<p>So, the quest for the holy grail - a true market opportunity. The needle in the haystack, the Higgs boson, Wally... everybody's looking for it, but it's not easy to find.</p>
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<h3 style="text-align:left">All this, and it needs to be completely new and unheard of; a Unicorn.<br></h3>
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<p>As a distributor, identifying a product is exactly like hunting. We have to consider the best environments in which to seek out <g class="gr_ gr_7 gr-alert gr_gramm gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim Grammar only-ins replaceWithoutSep" id="7" data-gr-id="7">prey</g>; we need to understand the correct tools to lure them in. This may sound a bit underhanded, but it’s a genuine requirement. Pitch it wrong and you risk finding products that can’t meet the market requirements or that have unrealistic expectations - both scenarios lead to potentially disappointed customers. Finally, you need to make sure your hunt happens at the right time; there’s no point catching products that aren’t servicing a ready market.  <br></p>
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<p>Selectec has proven historically that their prowess in identifying products that are in this Unicorn category. For example, our well-known history with Papercut... from its early days in the Print Management Market to our huge success as we identified its suitability, fresh outlook and the quality of the product.<br></p>
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<p>As our focus expands into wider categories, we’ve deployed the hunting party once more - once again we’ve found another herd of mature, strong and healthy candidates for software glory.</p>
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<p><a href="https://staging.selectec.com/products/square-9-enterprise-content-management/">Square 9 Softworks</a>, with a decade and a half of success, clever products, great support and exciting road maps, but all fairly well exclusively contained in the USA. <a href="https://staging.selectec.com/products/foldr/">Foldr</a>, around for a good long while, but only known to a small group of IT experts in the limited field of Secondary Education. Foldr is innovative, smart looking, flexible, well supported and almost a total secret.<br></p>
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<p>These and others are the underpinnings of greater opportunities for our partners.<br></p>
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<p>The difference between a good software distributor and a great software distributor is its support. In software, this is all too often focused on technical prowess... this is of course hugely important, and never taken lightly. However, if your business is to help other businesses grow the identification of growth markets, the development of commercial support and sales techniques to help those businesses thrive is every bit as critical. <br></p>
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<p>I’ve had a few job titles in my time. Some I’ve liked, some I’ve loved (and a few I’ve regretted!) but Unicorn Tracker is my absolute favourite so far.</p>
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<h3 style="text-align:center; line-height: 1.5em;">We’re running an introduction to Document Management as a product solution, if you'd like to find out more why not join our next webinar?<br><br><a class="uk-button uk-button-large uk-button-primary style=" text-align:="" center;="" href="https://zoom.us/meeting/register/c3b469ded3f6b0168c34be5db4a05ad8">Sign up for the webinar</a></h3>
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