A few months ago, I was able to secure an appointment with a prospect on the premise that we might be able to lower their costs by reducing their copy and print overage charges from their current vendor.
The overage pitch was not my idea, but was borrowed from Paul Giorgi from Print Audit. I've been using the overage pitch off an on over the last few months.
During our survey, I was able to discover that the prospect has two MFP devices, one color and one black. The color unit had a speed of 65 pages per minute and the black was 60 pages per minute. The color device was leased and the black device was owned.
Discovery
Thus, the discovery process was on! I was able to secure a copy of the lease and was taken back somewhat because the term of the lease was 60 months and there were 28 or so payments on the lease! Egads, I thought, is it time to walk away? The lease also had maintenance and supplies built in for both devices, for "x" amount of color per month and "x" amount of black per month.
My next step was to get a copy of the last twelve invoices, mind you, I needed to know the average monthly volume, the overage costs and the current per page cost before I could tell the prospect that we would be able to reduce their costs.
After receiving all of the paperwork, I explained to the prospect that I needed to do my homework, and secured the next appointment before I left that day.
Crunching the Numbers
Back at the office, I was astonished that the amount of color pages that were built into the monthly lease was only 3,000 per month. After reviewing all of the invoices, and meter reads, I found that their color volume averaged 17,000 pages per month. Thus, they were getting crushed with overage volume on the color device. In addition the prospect was not able to meet the minimum color volume none out of the last twelve months.
Once I ran the numbers of replacing the color device, moving the maintenance and supplies off the lease and then charging an annual payment, I was able to have a push with the costs. Meaning, the customer wouldn't pay anymore to replace the new device, yet they weren't really saving much with the new device. Not a great scenario for someone to change.
Rules Based Printing
Ok, so I need to dig a little deeper, on the second appointment I wanted to make sure that I understood their color use. Thus, we went over what types of documents were printed in color, and that's when it all started to click for us. I was able to find out that many users were printing color web pages, emails which had a small color logo, and 87% of all the documents were printed single sided. I thought, this is the perfect opportunity to start having a conversation about print rules.
I then proceeded to educate the prospect on the use and benefits of print rules, touching on those key documents which were email pages that were printed, pages printed from the web, enabling or disabling color permissions for different users and applications, ability to track who printed and copied from the device, along with the ability to assign a cost per page for color and black. I especially like the later, because the prospect will be able to see how many pages were print in color and black and association their own cost per page which could then be used to "charge back" usage to other departments.
After having the conversation about print rules, we found many pain points that included prints and copies being left at the device with personal information, waste which included not using the reverse side of the sheet of paper, the need for secure print for executives. Our DM concluded that having Print Rules in place would be beneficial in reducing their costs because the employees would realize that printing and copying is being audited.
Hey, I had a little bit of luck, and the main reason for that is we're a Premium Print Audit Dealer. My advantage is that I was able to charge $1.00 per month for sixteen licenses of PA, along with another sixteen license for secure print. We also were able to build in the embedded print audit MFP option for $25 per month. The total monthly cost was $57 for 60 months for Print Audit, the prospect was enthralled with the features and the ability to reduce color volume, reduce paper costs and become more environmentally friendly.
Having the ability to offer rules based printing from Print Audit helped us place a new device, increase clicks and have a recurring revenue stream. The prospect was able to control print, reduce usage which in turn reduced costs.
-=Good Selling=-
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