Dam, I almost finished this entire blog and I erased it!!
There's a new game in town for comparing printer and copier devices
Back in the eighties it was all about speeds and feeds, if you needed to compare a Ricoh vs Canon, you grabbed your spec check book, made a copy of each page, then broke out the color highlighters and proceeded to highlight your best specs vs the competitors worst specs. Those that had more "best" specs usually won the day and the sale.
Do You Remember When?
Back in the day, after the demise of the spec check copier books, there were a few companies that offered lab reviews of copiers along with speeds and feeds. Believe it or not, it was possible to get a report that rated a copier as "stinky" (something like that), many of us in the industry always held our breath when the lab reports came out. The "stinky" lab report was usually the kiss of death, and you better believe that your competition was using this to crush you!!
It's All GOOD, Ever Copier is GOOD
FOOEY, I'm claiming BS! Years ago, those manufacturers that received those "stinky" reports starting throwing more money for independent labs to test their copier devices. As the amount of money tossed around got larger and larger, then all of a sudden, low and behold, we were not seeing any "stinky" reports for any copiers. How is that? All of a sudden there was no copier that stunk? We all know what happened (wink), because we all have to deal with "stinky" copiers from time to time, even with the advancements in technology.
Where Do you Fight the Battle?
Off the top of your head, what is foremost on almost every buyers mind when purchasing or leasing a new copier? Give up? It's cost, and not only the cost of the system but the Total Cost of Ownership.
It's easy to figure out your costs, and easy when you can get the net new customer to give up their costs. But, what happens when they can't produce an invoice, can find the maintenance agreement or there is a new staff in place and all of the past copier paperwork is missing? Arrrgggh, it's a nightmare.
gapCompare
I'm pretty lucky, I have this great relationship with gap Intelligence, and for the last two months I've been able to test their gapCompare product. I'm impressed with the product, and was floored that I was able to do four up cost comparisons for total cost of operation. It was so cool that I was able to model the same unit four different ways for cost per page scenarios!
I can also view average street costs for my competitors, along with street CPC, along with all of those speeds and feeds. In addition I can add and subtract filters for finding the "right" competitive device. In a nutshell, with using gapCompare, I'm gonna crush my competition!
LAB Reports Are Lame!
Reports are lame, because there are NO "stinky" copier report anymore, gapCompare is awesome because you're focused on what your buyer is focused on, and that's the true cost of operation.
Who is gap intelligence?
I posed the above question to Gary Peterson (President) back in February, his response is below.
When people ask me how gap intelligence is different from other research houses I always use the "forest vs. the trees" analogy. Other research houses take a "30,000 foot view" of the forest and from that vantage point they can tell you where the forest is growing, struggling, or is on fire. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this approach and they all do extremely strong work following the industry this way. Our approach is different in that we check every leaf on every tree every week and by doing so we believe that we can tell you where the forest is thriving and struggling faster.
-=Good Selling=-
Comments (2)