It's been a few days since I've had the desire to write. I'd bet the ranch that if I were paid to write, well... let's say it would be like an actor having stage fright. Ah ha! That's it, I've had writer's block.
Today
The last few days, I've had no ideas, no thoughts, until today. Today, I found myself trying to reel in a deal that I thought was in the bag, only to find out that the fight was on from a competitor.
What happens when you can't or don't want to budge on price? We're taught to fall back on our value points. Reemphasize those value points, why we're better, right? Thus, what happens when that doesn't work?
Today, I found myself doing an old-fashioned side-by-side comparison for XYZ copier (leaving it as XYZ because my competition may be reading this and I don't want to let them know what I'm up to). I've written about the side-by-side comparisons before, and a great place to get these is from GAP TCO. Thus, there I was reading the GAP TCO spec report on the XYZ system, checking out the brochure of the XYZ system, checking my brochure, and then back to GAP again for additional specs on my own system.
Side By Side
I took a few minutes to recall the past few meetings with the prospect and was trying to remember what was important to them. Besides the feeds and speeds, besides price, what was one of their top concerns when looking at a new vendor? I recalled some of the conversation about maintenance, downtime, and how important that was to them. This particular customer can't afford to have their system down a few times a month due to their tenacious appetite for paper! The prospect understands breakdowns; however, they will not tolerate a service engineer that comes out, diagnoses the fault, then states that they don't have the part and need to make a return call. We know the drill, right?
All of the above brought back memories from my old analog side-by-side comparisons. Years ago, it was more about FAB (feature-advantage-benefit). If no luck with FAB, you would then look to the consumables, in particular, how long those consumables would last before a service engineer had to be on site.
Scenario
In the scenario I was working on today, it dawned on me that the drums in the XYZ system had to be replaced more often than mine. In fact, those drums had to be replaced every 300K compared to every 900K in my system. Digging deeper, I found that the same was true with the waste toner container; theirs was 30K, mine every 125K. Replacement of toners also had me ahead, for every two of theirs, we only needed one.
My road to earning the sale will be to educate the prospect that even with zero breakdowns, my competitor's system will be down at the very minimum three times as much as my Ricoh.
I'll let you all know how this works out, and remember to do those side-by-sides, and you can get all of the neat information that I used from GAP TCO.
PS
That appointment did take place. I started off with this question: "With our last discovery meeting, you told me that reliability and uptime are key factors when deciding on choosing a vendor, is that still true?" My prospect stated, "Yes, if we're not printing, we're not making money." "You're still considering that XYZ device, correct?" I stated. "Yup, pretty much it's between your copier and theirs."
"Got it, take a look at this. I printed this from our spec guide on the XYZ copier. Please take a look at what I highlighted. Do you see the life of the drum at 300k?" Our DM looked at the doc and stated, "Why are you showing me this?" I then added our DM to the spec guide for my copier and also had the yield highlighted on the drum. I told him that our drum will last three times longer than the XYZ drum. What that means is that the copier from XYZ will be down three times to our one, since the Drum kit will take almost an hour to install. You're looking at two hours extra downtime with the XYZ copier.
After showing those docs and specs, the rest was easy, and the order was brought home
-=Good Selling=-
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