That magical day has arrived! Eighty-Eight business days since I was optioned to working remote. Four full months from the home office, four months with only four in-site appointments, and four months of stress.
Four months and still no sign of when offices in New Jersey will be full staffed again. Even though the number of COVID illnesses and deaths are at the lowest point since the first week of March. At the end of each day I'm mentally exhausted, thus the reason for not posting on Friday of last week. In addition I also did not send my Monday night email address.
As of now what I accomplished last Friday is a blur. What I do remember is that I received another net new order. But all of the orders have been small this month, I'll probably write 5 orders and will be lucky if they all top 30K. The only saving grace to the last three days of the month is that there's a shot to reel in another $60K net new order. We have a meeting scheduled on Wednesday to review the configurations and the financing options.
I did receive an order this AM for a 25PPM #A3 device and yes it was not over spec'd and over sold. The client required 11x17 and I passed along a great price to made sure the order came to me this month.
I've had some people ask me what I'm doing differently during these times. Besides the prospecting with mostly emails and targeted calls I've found that I'm not worried about GP. I'm giving my best price at the onset and where ever the chips fall they fall. I guess for me it's about driving revenue and also driving orders that tells me I can do this in these times. Yes, I would like to make more GP who wouldn't, but the cheese continues to be moved on us. I guess at this point I was make a good mouser.
I want to get back to pricing for a moment. One of my good buddies emailed me a quote for a Ricoh IM C4500 on Friday. He stated this is what he's up against in his neck of the woods. I took a look at the pricing and all I could think was HOLY ****, what the heck is going on? You can view that quote here and I think it's excellent for us to have a dialog how this pricing is possible. Would love to hear from others!
I have a 7AM appointment tomorrow morning and thank goodness it's two miles away. I have a verbal on the wide format, however stairs are involved and before I lose another order to stairs I need to be on-site for a sight survey. Keeping my fingers crossed with this one.
I mentioned losing an order because we and another good copier moving company could not finagle a Ricoh MP 6700SP up a flight of stairs. I still have an opportunity to move a CW2201, however the client and I are $500 apart and my hands are tied. Tomorrow I'll be walking away from this one and telling the client I'm sorry can't get to your price. We'll see how bad the need is now.
Back to the Ricoh MP W6700SP, Ricoh needs to make a change to this device. The larger 10ppm and 14ppm wide formats can break down with a separation unit. Ricoh needs to make this available for the MP W6700SP and include it at no cost to the dealer. When they do their research do they not understand that there's no an elevator in every building.
Three days left in the month, still more than 10% of the month is left and anything can happen.
-=Good Selling=-
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