It was rise and shine at 5AM today! I'm getting to like this early gig and getting more time to spend outside.
Since I was up so early I made it the office a little before 7AM today. That early time was used to develop and send both a proposal and order docs to the net new client that gave the verbal the other day. Since the order is for three MPF's and two locations I spent about two hours developing those docs. Normally I would just send the order docs, however the decision maker also wanted supporting docs since most of our communiques were via email. It was two hours later when I received an email from the client with few additional questions. It's still a long shot to have the documents tomorrow and my gut feeling is that I'll probably have them on Monday. Monday is the first day of my vacation. Oh well when you're in sales we really never have a true vacation.
I was also able to secure a verbal for the small A4 MFP today for about $2k. Docs went out late today and I'm hoping to have them back today. It's always interesting when a client asks you for pricing for an additional MFP. In this case the client had an older Brother MFP that they were using in accounting. Mostly for printing and faxing......, yup I thought the same thing when I heard faxing.
Since the Brother was so inexpensive the first thought is how can I justify my cost of $2,500? All I could think about is that they client would remember that the paid maybe $500 for the Brother all those years ago. But I also knew that they had shopped a fuser for the Brother and it was $200 bucks.
At first I thought about our cheap A4's and the thought of placing a $400 MFP wasn't sitting well with me. All I could think about is that the MFP would fail in the next year and I would get the first call. This client had just received a new color A4 and a color wide format last week, with that I took to figuring the lease cost for the next 60 months. I was a hair under the $50 per month and then had to add the service and supplies to get my final cost. Before I send the emai; to the client I called and asked if he had 15 minutes to review the email I was going to send. That answer was yes and the sent email was on the way.
The plan was to whittle down the cost of my MFP with telling the client about the savings over the Brother. I asked how many toner cartridges they bought per year, how many drum cartridges and then verified with the client what they spend for those consumables. I then focused on the toner cartridges and the volume that we being printed and faxed.
The end result is that I was able to show that the client would save about $30 per month from what they were spending on the Brother each month. That $30 savings made my MFP more palatable for them. In addition I spoke about the benefit of the all inclusive service and supplies along with having the same scanning features on the new device. Within an hour we had the verbal for the order. Not a big sale, but if your know your MFP inside and out along with having knowledge about their existing MFP you can make a case for spending more.
Having a plan and knowing your **** in advance of the call put me in a better position to sell the value of Ricoh and our brand for service and support.
I knocked out some smaller items on my to do list. Tomorrow I'll be calling everyone in my funnel, and hoping to process these two orders along with another A3 that may have legs. Hoping I can bank $26k by tomorrow. It's a long shot but I have the entire day to make it happen.
Depending on how I feel tomorrow because vacation does start at 5PM will dictate a blog tomorrow night. If I'm blogging that means I got ink on paper and if not I'll still like where I'm at for the month of July.
-=Good Selling-=
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