What a night it was at The Cannata Awards Dinner! I found my-self calling it a night early because I had two appointments on Friday. My first stop was at a new account in Princeton, thus I had to l leave two hours available to fight the New Jersey traffic. Left the Westminster Hotel at 8AM, and arrived at my net new prospect just a few minutes before 10AM. It's always good to be on time.
My first appointment with this prospect was back in late May of this year. This net new and new business was in the need for a color multifunctional device. I only knew about the new business bit when we first met. The gatekeeper was tasked with finding the right vendors, receive pricing and then make recommendations to the CEO. In early June, I was able to secure and approval with out a PG (PM me for details can't post them here), and posted this prospect as an opportunity to close in June. June came and past and nothing, I later found out that the prospect was going to hold off some since they did not have all of the employee's hired and thought the system was not needed at this time. Each month I would call and follow up, then just a week ago the gatekeeper reached out to me to say that they were ready to order and wanted to meet to review the pricing.
Our meeting went well, the CEO was not there to sign, thus I left the paperwork and stated I could return later in the day to pick that paperwork up. I stated I would call after my last appointment.
That meeting took almost and hour, and since I my next appointment was at 3PM, I thought it would be best to head back to the office to log a few more calls. The ride back was about an hour, that put me at noon. I took my entire hour for lunch and resumed catching up on a few phone calls and answering a few email. Before I new it, the time was 2:15 and it was time to leave for my next call with an existing account that has about 5 months of payments on a 36 month lease.
My first appointment for this account was about three weeks ago. Our client was having some pain with the annual color pages being at almost 250,000 and they were expecting another increase of 10-20% in the next calendar year. When a client already has two 80 ppm color devices, it drives the question of where do you go from here? I had a few ideas, one was to take and existing 80 ppm color device and move that to black only, and drive all of the color pages to either a light production color or a production system. After 30 minutes of posing additional questions about workflow, compliance issues, and knowledge of their existing marketing people, I realized that my initial plan would not fly.
In additional there were no other options. I thought it would be best to "let the ball travel", because there were only five payments left on the lease and I knew that the new MP C8003's are just on the horizon. Both the client and I agreed that we would meet again in 30 days to review color volume, review features and specs of MP C8003 as long as the system was released. I also made it clear that we are approaching our end of year and I would we could both benefit of upgrading the current lease before the end of this year. Thus, an opportunity was created for $40k that would close before the end of this year.
By the time I walked out it was 4PM and I turned my attention the meeting I had this AM. I accessed my phone as I arrived to my call and there was an email from that net new prospect that started with, "I'm sorry". Geesh, WTF I thought! I finished reading the email to find out that my gatekeeper also had to run the order past here CFO. My gatekeeper explained that she had met a copier rep in the last week, and was also going to get a price from them. Easy come, easy go, right? I sent my gatekeeper stating thank you and also stated that we are not going to be the cheapest price and you can't get the lowest price and have excellent support. I sent that email a little after 4PM, and had no response till the end of the day. Figure I will attack this on Monday AM. I had decent GP, now I gotta rack my brain for some ideas for Monday.
Earlier in the day, I thought this was a sure thing, and now it's not. I'm hoping I can get this back to a sure thing Monday AM.
Amount Sold Today = 0
Total Revenue to Date = $2K
New Opportunities Created = $40K
Total New Opportunities Created = $52K
-=Good Selling=-
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