Back in the Eighties one of the first lessons I learned was that of "page coverage" and how to explain it to the end user. Back in the day there wasn't a single copier dealer that included toner in their maintenance agreements.
Clients had to buy toner, imagine that! However, with the buying of the toner came the questions about the yield of the toner bottle or cartridge.
We would field calls like, "You told me that the toner cartridge would last 10,000 pages, and I'm only getting 3,000 pages, you need to come pick this piece of crap up or fix it". Yup, in the early days I had no clue what page coverage meant and when someone asked, "how long will the toner last". I went to my spec check guide (anyone remember Hanson's Guidelines?) and relay the yields of the toner bottles/cartridges.
I had no clue that page coverage played such an important part with toner yield and cost per page. Neither did I know that one to two page print jobs will use more ink and toner than multi page print jobs.
After getting a few brow beatings, I made sure that when I stated the yield of the toner cartridge that I also added, "based on 5% coverage of the page". That statement led to another series of questions like, "what the heck does 5% coverage of the page mean?". I then explained that if you were to condense all of the black toner on the page to a small square, then that square could not cover anymore than 5% of the white area of the page.
Most clients then stated, "well, that's not much at all, we put three to four times that on the document", and I would state, "you see, that's the reason why you are not getting the yield out of your toners. Your ten percent of coverage means that you'll only get 5,000 pages of yield from that toner bottle. It was a learning curve for all of us.
One of the files that I keep in my dropbox account (also have a hard copy with me at all times), is page coverage document. This document shows samples of 5%, 7.5%, 10%, 20%, 25% and 50% coverage for black and color documents.
Our prospects are doing much of their research with out us when it comes to find the right MPF device that will meet their needs for volume, speeds and features.
In recent appointments, I've had a number of prospects that finally figured out their little A4 printer (color & black) was robbing them blind with the cost of those toner cartridges and consumables.
Validation
Most SMB accounts can't or won't dig up the invoices for the cartridges for that $400 printer. They make statements such as, "this is our third drum in four months and the cost of each drum is $130.00". Statements like that sounds like music to our ears, right? But, it those statements that can actually bugger up the sales process, because they don't have a validation of their costs.
One such color printer from a sales call the other day was a Brother color laser printer. Once the prospect showed me the printer, I then checked the model number, obtained a meter read from the config page and then asked the client how long have they had the device for. With that data, I can quickly determine the volume of that device. Simple stuff, right?
My next move is to that come to Jesus meeting with them about page coverages. I would then break out the sample book and have them tell me which documents best describe your out put on a daily basis. Once they have picked the document I then explain how page coverage works with the manufacturers. In most cases black documents are more like 15% and color seems to average about 25%.
The reason I go through this process is for the validation, I need them to agree and buy in that they are using more toner on their documents. Thus the yields of the cartridges will drop and their costs will increase. These clients have un controllable expenses with these devices. I want to makes these expenses controlled and fixed with new devices.
Once I have the validation or buy-in, I can then use my GAP TCO and produce a report that shows them their costs for that device or many of their devices.
The point that I want to make, is that with SMB accounts it can be harder to get to that validation process for costs (especially with single A4 devices). Having a document that shows the prospect page coverage samples can help you validate their existing costs without slowing down the sales cycle because you are waiting on invoices that may or may not be found.
You can go here and download the same sample book that I use.
-=Good Selling=-
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