It's been an interesting three months to start my thirty-eighth year in copiers sales. I started the year off with some type of fraking bug that kept me down an out for about three weeks. February ended up good, March was down and April is still waiting to finish.
It was last Wednesday when I looked at my funnel and thought, "this ain't good, there's enough in the funnel but nothing is moving". That's my hint that I need to put some rubber on the road. I spent the last part of Wednesday culling my CRM for some planned cold calls. Seventy-five percent of these were net news that were not co-operating with my phone call efforts, the rest were existing accounts that needed to have a visit.
My goal was to have twenty planned visits and then make a few unplanned visits to additional net news. I made sure that I grouped then by town and would drive north and then work my way south to finish the day.
Knocking on doors is a great way to get a birds eye view of existing copiers and finding out who the DM is. From time to time you even get to see the pain points that businesses have with office equipment.
The first four calls were non eventful. The fifth call (non-planned) had me eye to with a refurbished wide format copier that was just delivered and waiting for install. While at that location one of the influencers took me for a short tour and then elaborated on how they didn't like their A3 Canon copier. After a few more minutes our talk centered on quoting for a new copier. Chalk one up for net new opportunity!
After an hour or so I cleared my first town and moved further south to the next group of planned stops. I was able to knock out another ten or so stops and a couple of unplanned calls. This group of visits produced no leads, although I did have some eyeballs on existing copiers that were in place.
It's just about 2PM when I arrived for my next group of calls. It's interesting that out of all of the planned calls, I was not able to generate any opportunities with the twenty planned stops. I did gather intel for future calls, but not one of them panned out.
It's 3 PM and I spied a construction outfit that I thought might fit the bill for wide format. Turns out there was no wide format needed, however I got into a conversation with the DM about computers. He told me that he was looking to go back to having a server. I spied this place pretty good, there were four PC's, three A4 MFP's and I questioned the DM on why he thinks he needs a server.
After another 30 minutes I had the DM convinced that Quick Books Cloud, MS Office Suite and DropBox was a better way to save a few bucks. I told the DM about my DropBox experience and told him that DropBox business was a great way for him to see his tickets (invoices) that other users had created. Make a long story short, I was asked to submit a proposal for an A4 color device that could scan to DropBox. There's number two!
Just a few blocks away was another net new account that I've been stopping in for the last ten years or so. This was not a planned visit, but one of those extra visits. Low and behold the DM was there, we chatted about business, and the cold weather. Can't tell you much that happened after that (because I do have competitors that read this blog). What I can tell you is that I developed an opportunity for $300K that could come down the pike very soon. Woohoo! That's three!
Thinking back, this kind of day doesn't happen that often. Maybe I'll get one order, maybe none or maybe all three. You just never know what tomorrow will bring as long as you keep working!
-=Good Selling=-
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