MFP Wars, Who Wins, Who Loses?

Art...it's all about market share, especially in color! the head of our service department said that last 2006 our color was only 1% of total placement, but made up for 6% of total aftermarket/service revenue. After the 2nd quarter of this year it was 3% of units, but nearly 23% of aftermarket/service. so the direct writers could give a rip about GP on the units when there is that much to be made on the backend. for them, if the rep makes it, fine. if not there are replacements graduating every semester to take their place. sad...but true

gotcha, we have to continue re-iventing and re-investing in our solutions and our offerings to the end users.

It seems in the past two months were I have developed the lead, developed the need and then took them through the process at the last moment a Direct Rep stumbled across the customer and then took all of the margin out of the deal, thats fustrating!

At times I thought it was too co-incendental that two of the 3 accounts were incumbments and RBS ran across them, makes me wonder sometimes where the Aficio League Spiff information goes, gee I wonder if it ever filters down to the RBS channel, if so I'd be selling my soul for $100. Hoping I am way off base here and that info is kept confidential.

i am in the same situation with an account right now. did an analysis for a business and had everything set, demo went out and everything was fine then a dealer came in undercut the deal and all of the hard work AND gp went out the window. the nice thing is it doesn't happen all of the time.

It seems to be happening more and more in Jersey.

Art, does your dealership submit client info with the invoices for Ricoh spiffs? My owner has a policy that we will not submit client info to any vendor, we still get the Ricoh points, we dropped the spiffs with one of our other vendors beacuse they wanted cleint info.

We enter the company name and phone on Aficio League and then must supply and invoice. Wonder who is monitoring that info at Ricoh, I think it might be pretty tempting to sell or distribute if the right person asks.

Art,

You can simply black-out the sensitive customer information and simply reference the customer information as the invoice # that you are sending in.

Thats what we do, for fear of what your talking about. It seems very "coincidental" that all of a sudden you have directs showing up in your accounts.