Mutoh grows by 37 per cent

Wide format solutions supplier Mutoh has seen a year-on-year growth of 37 per cent after Hamish Alexander, new national sales manager ANZ, focused the company’s attention on customer service. Alexander, who has been in the top job for the last six months, says in a short period the team have turned the company around, and proved that it can be a profitable business.

Hamish Alexander

Hamish Alexander, Mutoh national sales manager ANZ

Alexander says, “People will have their opinions about the company but let’s be honest, Mutoh is a strong company. And everyone you ask will tell you that it has a great product. “The rest you can fix. The internal processes, the sales processes, the support services, all of those kinds of things you can fix. And that is what we are doing.” Alexander assumed his role at Mutoh after a rich sales career working for HP and other big names. “I have had quite a mixed career, starting off with FMCG in grocery and pharmacy. And then about 20 years I did a sharp turn into IT, where a friend asked for my help in running his sales team selling ink consumables and toner cartridges,” he says. That is when he began a career that later saw him headhunted by Hewlett Packard, where he won several high profile multimillion dollar jobs and proved his worth to the industry. After a stellar eight year career at HP he took some time off to ‘do whatever he wanted to’ before taking the position of the national sales manager ANZ at Mutoh earlier this year. Alexander says, “I didn’t know much about Mutoh, I ran into them a few times, but they were not on my radar. “But as I dug deep into Mutoh I realised that it is a significant business, with a significant market share outside Australia, which showed me that there was plenty of potential here. The products were and are recognised as outstanding, it was just that the focus needed to be adjusted.” He describes Mutoh as a conservative engineering company, which is ‘learning more and more about how to be a sales and marketing company’. Alexander says, “So the first thing is to stop, and start from the customer’s end. Not the other way around. We were doing things the wrong way around, and were too concerned with our internals. “Today if a customer has an issue we go and fix it. And everything else comes afterwards. That is how it should be. It is quite simple really it is not rocket science.” He says while the company is shifting its focus on the customer that is not an indication of its intention to sell directly to the market. Alexander says, “We will not be doing any direct business; we will be on the same motion selling through a nationwide network of dealers.” “My boss Mr. Maeda saw what needed to happen here in Australia and recruited new staff , to reinvigorate Mutoh and we have seen the business grow.” He says new faces also means new ways of approaching the market and ensuring Mutoh customers are getting more value. “Previously, we went down the track of working with dealers who were really high touch, meaning they weren’t the classical industry dealer,” Alexander says. “We brought on a few new dealers who did not have a lot of experience, so we had to do a lot of the heavy lifting for which we did not have the infrastructure. “So we said enough of that. Let’s go back to our traditional base and talk to dealers and ask them how we can add value to their business, and surprisingly a lot of the dealers were supportive of that.” Currently Mutoh has ten dealers, but Alexander wants to decrease that depending on their reach, scope and the geography. Alexander says, “It’s not about how many dealers we will have, it’s about how we will approach the market. “We have changed the structure of the dealers and now will have two levels; one will be called premium dealers and the second will be authorised dealers. “The premium dealer has to have the full support and service structure authorised and trained by us so they know exactly what they are doing when they come across an issue. That is a must. It is none negotiable. They must also be supportive of our Mutoh original inks.” He says the company will also bring new products after careful assessment to add more value to its Australian business.

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