Hard Copy: What’s Most Important to You?

written by Scott Cullen | October 9, 2019

From the Editor’s Desk

I love fall, the changing colors, the cooler weather, the baseball playoffs, our Annual Dealer Survey. As I’m writing this in early September, I”m lamenting the performance of my beloved Mets who had me optimistic only a few weeks ago that they were on the verge of making a push for one of the two NL wildcard slots. It’s just about time to start waiting until next year.

This is also when we put the finishing touches on our 2020 editorial calendar, our roadmap of what we will write about in the coming year. Even though we finalize the editorial calendar in early fall, we remain flexible and can adjust accordingly based on rapidly emerging trends or big news stories such as our Xerox coverage earlier this year. We also cull ideas from our Annual Dealer Survey, particularly when it comes to dealer concerns and new opportunities. It’s nice to work from an outline.

To be more responsive to our readers, in our 34th Annual Dealer Survey we asked dealers to identify the topics they would like us to cover more, less and about the same as we always have throughout the year. That information is helping us decide our future editorial direction.

For instance, smart office solutions, managed IT, security, and entrepreneurship topped the list of subjects readers would like to see us write more about. Three topics readers feel we should devote less coverage to throughout the year include leasing, digital signage, and production and industrial print. Even though we were surprised by the latter, we remain bullish as ever about the production and industrial print opportunity while understanding that not every dealer has the commitment or resources to enter that market segment. Most dealers responding to our Survey felt our coverage of MPS, women and young influencers, and A3 and A4 technology were just about right.

For the first time in reporting our survey results, we broke down the preferences by dealers with more than $7.5 million in revenues and dealers with less than $7.5 million in revenues. For the most part, there was a lot of consistency with the responses with one surprising exception. Dealers with revenues of less than $7.5 million (40%) were interested in reading more about production and industrial print than those with revenues of more than $7.5 million (29%) a year in revenue.

But what are we missing that’s important to you?

If it’s a topic the editorial team agrees has merit, we”ll add it to the list of topics we”re writing about next year, either in print or on our website. We also welcome suggestions for a fresh angle, approach or perspective to legacy topics such as managed network services, A4, leasing, production print, trends, or any topic we are writing about.

Send me an email at scullen@cannatareport.com with your recommendations. We believe your voice is important, and we honestly do listen to our readers.

ScottSig