Roboze announced yet more resellers for their products, illustrating the critical importance of resellers to manufacturers.
Roboze is an Italian firm producing industrial high-temperature 3D printers that can print quality parts in materials like PEEK or PEKK. They’ve been quite successful in recent years, and part of that is due to their reseller strategy.
A reseller is of critical importance to a manufacturer. That’s because manufacturers tend to be good at making machines, but not as specialized in selling products themselves.
Resellers, on the other hand, are terrible at making machines, but specializing in selling.
Resellers also have the major advantage of local reach. Roboze, for example, is based in Bari, Italy. That’s quite far from Oslo, Pittsburgh, Buenos Aires and Adelaide. Roboze can’t be in all those places and many more; it would cost far too much to set up a sales operation in each country and region.
Worse, the initial sales into a specific territory will be quite small, and they’d only grow over time. Because of the small initial sales, it would be nearly impossible to finically justify the cost of a local sales force.
That’s where resellers step in. They typically sell a variety of products from many manufacturers, allowing them to make a profit even though they may not sell very many units from a specific manufacturer.
The same could be said for support and service as well as sales: the reseller is physically present and can therefore provide far better service than a distant manufacturer.
The local resellers also have the bonus of being “connected”. That means they:
- Understand the local language
- Understand the local sales practices, procedures and currencies
- Operate in the same time zone as the customers
- Have connections to many local buyers
- Are already set up for local corporate operation, pay local taxes, etc.
These are all things that a manufacturer doesn’t have to do when making the decision to enter a territory: they just strike a deal with an already-established local reseller.
This is precisely what Roboze is doing with their announcement this week of these three new resellers:
- Tamspark Oy in Finland
- Solid Print3D in UK
- Axiomatek in Mexico
By continually adding resellers, Roboze — and any 3D printer manufacturer — can quite rapidly expand their sales presence. There are resellers everywhere, and it’s simply a matter of signing them up and providing them with product.
This is a very smart strategy by Roboze, as the customers of resellers tend to be quite loyal. This means repeat and expanded sales over time in each region.
The biggest players in the 3D print space all have large reseller networks, and it seems that Roboze wants to join them.
Via Roboze
