Tonight I had the pleasure to have dinner with Vince McHugh. Vince works for NECS and writes his own blog named The Connected Copier. Vince has much of the same background as myself being that we both started out in the industry as technicians. I had to change to sales when the owner of the company stated that I was doing a great job at taking the systems apart and not so good at putting them back together.
We reminisced on how we got to where we are today, and Vince had to told me a story about he was in training (I believe) in an 80 story office building where he was learning to service the 3M secretariat II copier. One in which you needed to remove the paper with tongs because the paper was on fire and had to drop it into a waste receptacle.
I then told Vince about how I started my own dealership with a technician, I was in sales and our first line of Authorized copiers was Towa. Vince exclaimed Towa, what's a Towa? Well back in the eighties Towa was a relabeled Sanyo copier. Does anyone remember the Sanyo copiers and fax machines? Hey, at that point in my sales career it was good to be Authorized for anything, Towa fit the bill.
I also spoke about my relationship with Brother LTD, my dealership was an Authorized reseller for Brother work processors, typewriters, fax machines and yes one of the first color copiers. We had one in our office and we resold color copies for about $2.00 each! But more importantly having the Brother dealership and Authorized repair facility allowed up to grow and customers came to us for repairs and in most cases they ended up buying additional products from us.
We as dealers need to find alternative ways to add new services to gain additional net new clients (the life and blood of growth), sometimes that can be done with adding a new line, or a new service. Of course you need to do the research to find out what products or services to add is best for your market place.
All in all I enjoyed the time I spent with Vince, and I look forward to reading his blogs and his threads on this site.
-=Good Selling=-
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