Best laid plans of mice and men.
That's what came to mind when I woke up at 8:13AM! I had set my alarm clock for 5:30AM so that I would be able to hit the office at about 7:00AM. Figured for the remaining forty four days of selling I would add an hour for every day, thus I can add almost another two days of selling. Well......, it seems that I did set my alarm for 5:30, but it was PM and not AM! The plan for tonight is to double the AM/PM on my phone.
Yup, I arrived at the office late and during the ride into the office, I was notified that my AM appointment needed to reschedule to a death in the immediate family.
The good news is that I have the entire day to catch up my CRM with all of the activity from Friday. In addition I can follow with many of my opps to move them forward to a closing appointment. I did not keep track of my phone calls today, however I did have some excellent talking tracks with a few of the open opportunities.
I did get a call from one Business Administrator asking me for additional information about a quote I submitted about four weeks ago. My client was asking for a revised proposal for a 55ppm color MFP, stating that she was waiting for the revised pricing on the maintenance/supply agreement that we spoke about, in addition she stated her purchasing person had asked, "why would we spend more on the Ricoh, rather than going with the "the other brand?" The other brand was $70 less per month than my Ricoh offering and I was at the bottom for pricing.
I called the BA, reminded her that I had sent the revised proposal about two weeks ago that included the reductions for the maintenance/supply agreement. I then moved to the issue of pricing, and stated, "here's what I can do, I'll develop a side by side spreadsheet for you that outlines the features that you require and I'll also include five or six specifications that will show your Purchasing Agent why the Ricoh device costs more, will that work for you?" she agreed and within a few minutes I was back to my meeting notes and outlining what features and specs were important to her department.
For us old timers, developing our own side by side comparison is something we always used to do in the seventies & eighties. If we knew who the competition was, then we developed a spreadsheet that focused on our positives and the competitors negatives. It was an effective way of presenting and closing the order from a sheet of paper.
Within forty five minutes I had developed the excel file that would show the feature set and specs that would show the Ricoh in the finest light. After completing the doc, I emailed it off to my BA. Just about twenty minutes later I had a return email asking me if I could add another device in my spreadsheet. I agreed to add the other device, and claimed that I would get this to her tomorrow in the AM.
You remember me speaking about those notes, right? For every prospect I visit, I will keep a page of notes from that meeting. In this case that the first appointment was already a month old and thank goodness I didn't have to rely on my memory. Those notes saved my butt, because I made sure that I lead with questions that focus on Ricoh strengths in the market place. Below is some of those feature sets:
- Customizable workflow shortcuts
- need to print 12x18 size documents
- scanning speed
- document feeder capacity
- fuser off mode for scanning
After I finish this blog, I'll be finishing the spreadsheet analysis for this client and then I'll be committing additional research that's required for another client. I'm hoping by the end of this week to putting up $50K on the board.
Amount Sold Today = 0
Total Revenue to Date = $2K
New Opportunities Created Today= $0K
Total New Opportunities Created = $154K
Revenue Required $198K
-=Good Selling=-
Comments (0)