I had to find away to not sell my client another copier aka MFP.
That client told me they thought they were printing too much volume on the A4 MFP they purchased 3 years ago. In fact I agreed when the meter on the copier gave up the ghost for the quarter of a million pages they produced. During the last 12 months the annual volume had to increased to 90K.
How could I be different from others that want to push a copier? I'd love to push a copier but considering where our industry is at with getting A4 copiers there needs to be another way.
Lately, I've had a lot of focus on our content offerings. Content offerings could be DocuWare, PlanetPress, Sharepoint and a host of others offerings that we can sell and install in 30 days or less.
Numbers
First things first, I had to find out the cost for the maintenance and supply contract for the 90K in prints. Okay I thought, is this all I have to work with identifying what the client is spending on those 90K of pages? The MFP cost amortization over 5 years gave me a few more bucks. There had to be more right? The next supply item is paper, ninety thousand sheets of paper is a decent volume for one device. Instead of guessing what the cost is for a sheet of paper went to Amazon to view the costs. Well, it had been some time since I priced paper. See the chart below, I looked at costs from eight suppliers, then pulled the average.
I was floored when I pulled the average for the cost per sheet! The cost per sheet was .0147. The last I remember the cost of paper was about $36 per case or .007 per sheet. Thus in the last couple of years paper has doubled.
Rising Costs
Clients are now spending almost $1,500 for every 100K copy/print paper. Cost per page pricing for maintenance and supplies in most cases is under .0125 per page. Thus the cost per page is now less than the cost for paper. Consider that same client will now spend $2,750 for every 100K the produce. Over 5 years that cost is a whopping $13,750. Let's call it a even $15K with device amortization.
What This Means
At the minimum I have almost $15K to work with to find some different options for the client rather them offering them another MFP. In addition many of these technology offerings can easily morph into additional non print opportunities.
Our meeting today produced some ideas on how to eliminate the paper process. In additional while digger deeper led me to finding out that the client is a current Datto user, interested in how to do more with less, looking to change their business line of software.
Thus even though I'm somewhat toward the end of my tale, there is still so many opportunities available to us. If you don't ask, you don't get and as Tim would say it all starts with a conversation.
_=Good Selling=-
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