Note from Art: in the past few months, I've been pushing our sponsors to get more involved with blogging on the site with informative information that will help us SELL MORE and understand new technologies.
Right now, UDOCX (Fenestra), Protected Trust and Muratec America are posting blogs for us. I hope this spreads to all of our sponsors because there is some great data/information that we can all use. So, here Andrew Jones with a blog about the "F-Word". Enjoy!!! I put the copier part in below!
Copier Reps: Start using the ‘F-word’
Andrew Jones, Muratec America, Inc.
The ‘F-word’ gets a bad rap. Reps avoid using it at all costs when talking with prospects. Truth is, millions of businesses use the ‘F-word’ every day. According to RingCentral, a cloud based phone systems provider, there are currently more than 17 million fax machines in use in the United States. If that’s the case, why do reps always ignore the fax machine? As George Bluth, Sr. [probably] said, “there’s always money in the fax machine.”
John Darlington, Muratec’s area sales manager for the southeast, recently delivered a webinar on how reps can leverage voice over IP (VoIP) into a sales opportunity. In his presentation, John highlighted the differences between a company’s copier lease and their analog phone bill. It’s often difficult to ask, and even harder to obtain, a prospect’s copier lease agreement. However, the phone bill is a different story. The phone bill is viewed as a “cost of doing business”—similar to rent and electricity. Gaining access to this information is often much easier and less risk to obtain than your prospect’s lease agreement.
As a rep, when you sit down with a prospect, about what percentage of the time do you lead with your proposed solution’s fax features? Not very often, right? Although proposing a fax solution is often not top of mind, it should always be an issue you address during your initial meeting with a prospect.
When you stumble across an organization with one of those 17 million fax machines, Muratec MFPs with Email Gateway can add value and save your customer money by enabling them to eliminate their analog fax lines, which on a national average cost $50/per month/per line. How can you help? It’s pretty simple.
Third party faxing companies, such as eFax, MetroFax and RingCentral, receive their customers’ inbound faxes and convert them to emails as PDF and/or TIFF attachments. So, how do you know whether your prospect uses a third party faxing company? Well, there are several schools of thought on this particular subject. We’ve found the most effective method is to ask. If they don’t know, which can often be the case, ask leading questions, such as, “Tell me how you send a fax”? or “Where do you receive your faxes”? If email is involved in any way, shape, or form, chances are, your prospect uses a third party faxing company.
Other good indicators your prospect might have a third party faxing system include:
- Companies with VoIP phone systems. If they’ve modernized their phone system, chances are, they’ve done something with their faxing, too.
- They receive faxes directly to their email and don’t print
- Organization with multiple locations. Larger companies’ analog fax line spend is multiplied based on the number of locations, and fax lines aren’t cheap.
So, what does all this mean for you, an office equipment sales representative? It allows you to sell value, not just on price. Sending a fax using a third party faxing company can be time consuming and a multi-step process, which often negates the fax line cancellation savings with labor increases (i.e. an employee walking to scanner, scanning the hard copy document back to his or her computer, open his or her email, composing email, attaching file, etc.) What if you could enable the customer to send a fax by simply entering the fax number and pressing [Start], without jumping through multiple hoops?
Muratec’s Email Gateway, included in the MFX-3510, MFX-3530 and MFX-3590, among other models, when configured with the third party faxing solution’s suffix, or domain name, transparently converts an “outbound fax” into an email that the third party faxing solution recognizes. So, with Email Gateway, the age old process of walking to the fax machine, dialing a number and pressing ‘Start’ stays the same.
Reps, let’s take the stigma out of using the ‘F-word’. Email Gateway could realistically be the differentiator that allows you to win your next deal. It’s all about asking the right questions to uncover all your prospects’ needs. Just give fax a chance.
-=good Selling=-
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