MFP Copier Blog

This Week in the Copier Industry 15 Years Ago

First Week of January 2007

Enjoy These Fantastic Copier threads from Fifteen Years Ago This Week!

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This Week in the Copier Industry Ten Years Ago

First Week of January 2012

Each week that passed from this point on gets us closer to logging twenty years of content for the copier industry.  It's not just twenty years of press releases but it's 20 years of amazing content that includes collaboration, idea's, thoughts, pricing, quotes, leads and excellent opinions.  Consider this your personal invitation to fuel your quest for knowledge and to continue to win.

Our Excellent Copier Threads from Ten Years Ago this Week!

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Badgerboy

“Courage doesn't mean never being afraid. We're all afraid sometimes. Bravery means doing the right thing anyway. That's true strength.”

Gwenda Bond

The truth will set you free in 2022! Growing your business will require you to new and different things.

Are you brave enough to make it happen?

Let's face it, in today's business climate, you're being faced with monumental challenges.

You must be savvy in navigating unique sales courses brought on by information-empowered buyers, digitization inside your respective channels, while continually adapting to a virtualized business world.

Competition is everywhere, from the well-established to tech savvy start-ups, layer in this uncontrollable events; and this places added pressure on your sales margins.

Here's the question for all you to think about...

How open are you to change?

How effective have you been in maintaining your clients?

How effective have you been in driving profitable new business growth?

What is your plan for client retention?

"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."

George Bernard Shaw

Growth and comfort do not play well together.

It's imperative that you retool parts of the sales process around a different model, one which calls for new approaches, new positioning, new client experiences, and new business growth; all centered on a well-organized plan.

In 2022, you must adapt to the rapidly changing market conditions, digital business models and disruptive competitors.

You must become laser focused on bringing fresh ideas and new insights in a hyper-personalized manner.

What sets you apart from all the other empty suits in your marketplace?

OBSESS YOURSELF WITH INFORMATION

You have unparalleled amounts of information available to you, to the point where information is no longer a competitive advantage.

Your competitive advantage is in plain sight and it's staring right back at you in the mirror.

What gives you the edge over all the other empty suits?

I believe it's the insight into how to use this information to help solve potential business problems and challenges for your clients.

Are you making your clients smarter or are your clients making themselves smarter?

How do you think this may affect your relationship?

Does it make any difference?

Trust, value and meaningful relationships... it is how you sell it and how you offer it that will set you apart.

What's your growth plan in 2022?

The head coach of any professional sports team has a game plan. What's yours? Will you rise to the challenge, dig in and do the work necessary to grow your sales?

TIME TO DOUBLE DOWN

“You never know what results will come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no results.”

Mahatma Ghandi

If you do nothing, there will be nothing!

What is your appetite to drive sales growth in 2022?

If you commit to doubling down on the following three areas while taking massive action, you will 2x your sales results in 2022.

CREATE INSEPARABLE BONDS AND PROTECT YOUR CLIENTS

One of the single best sources for sales growth - retaining and growing your client base. We all know it’s less expensive to retain your clients than it is to acquire new ones.

It is imperative that you build meaningful relationships high, wide and deep.

With transient careers, you become relationally vulnerable limiting who you know within your client base. You must go way beyond key decision makers. You must start to connect to company influencers, end users, and key department managers; cross pollinating relationships is mission critical.

You must build genuine, authentic relationships with an abundance of individuals within your client base, as the opportunity for loyalty increases.

One way to guarantee loyal clients is to create unbreakable heartfelt bonds.

"We share an unbreakable bond. And only the two of us know the secret codes for holding us together"

Palak Jain

Think about...

• Setting specific and agreeable expectations
• Continuing to bring insight and fresh ideas
• Nurturing the relationship online as well
• Intentional listening - go above and beyond, never break a promise

Are you creating the ties that bind with your clients?

Those of you who to fail building strong ties may see important deals collapse.

You must become obsessed with protecting and serving your clients.

Salespeople... You must become obsessed with your clients or someone else will.

It is about building rock-solid relationships. And in doing so, think about the networks you could create and the potential referrals you could curate.

DRIVE NEW BUSINESS

You can increase your sales by focusing less on acquiring new clients and more on your current clients?

Call me crazy but I promise you this works.

Most salespeople fail to capitalize on what sits close to home and who resides within the networks of people they already do business with.

To increase new business, you must concern yourself with reducing client attrition by providing them a memorable and outstanding experience.

The more you know about your clients, the more you grow with your clients

This opens new relationships, new conversations and new sales opportunities.

The more you learn about your clients, the more you earn from your clients

LEVERAGE SOCIAL TOOLS TO TARGET HIGH VALUE PROSPECTS

Listening is the new prospecting. Are you intentionally listening to the cues?

Fuel new business growth by integrating social into your prospecting cadence. Your clients and future clients use social, your competitors use social, quite frankly; social has become deeply woven into our everyday way of life.

The core elements of blending social into your process can be accomplished by:

• Building a personal value framework - establish your credibility and help create visibility within the marketplace
• Listen and learn - understand what your ideal clients are talking about... What's important? What's top of mind?
• Engage in conversations - join and start conversations moving them from online to offline

You must work strategically to implement a well targeted sales development growth plan.

You must become precision-like in proactively developing trusted and credible relationships with these high-valued opportunities.

"Superstars are relentless, unstoppable prospectors. They are obsessive about keeping their pipeline full of qualified prospects. They prospect anywhere and anytime—constantly turning over rocks looking for their next opportunity."

Jeb Blount

LET'S BRING THIS ALL TOGETHER

In the book, To Sell is Human by Daniel Pink, he writes about how we’ve gone from a "buyer beware" culture to a "seller beware" culture.

You already know this...

There is an enormous amount of information available via the internet that your clients and future clients have become well-versed in their options and interests before you may even enter the scene.

It's imperative you and mission critical that you understand your client's world. You must add value right from the get-go, not just show up, throw up and educate them on a product or solution.

Business growth is critical to your sales health.

Do you have the will-do and the can-do? Being open to growth enables you to innovate, as you rise above all the other empty suits.

You can either rise up and evolve or wallow in complacency and comfort.

"Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning."

Benjamin Franklin

I understand, I get where you all are coming from. Every day, I walk in your shoes. I am fully committed to helping your sales team integrate social aspects and heartfelt strategies into your current sales process to grow new business. I want you to get results. This is why I am passionate about doing this the right way, the genuine way, the authentic way! It's about understanding value before visibility.

Selling From the Heart is making a difference! I poured my heart into every page of this book and I believe you're going to love it. You can find it on Amazon in paperback, kindle and in audio.

In a world full of empty suits, I'm passionate about helping sales reps become sales professionals. I help sales teams understand the true value they bring to the market.

With great pride I transform, challenge, coach and inspire sales teams to grow new business by helping them share their story and how they communicate it out by integrating the use of social and Selling from the Heart.

You can follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebookand on my podcast by clicking on Selling from the Heart.

Please keep in mind that predictions are just that. In most cases I'm having fun with coming up with some extreme predictions that will never come to fruition.  However they do offer up some interesting "what ifs".

So 2021 was a year we would all like to forget again.  The global pandemic continued for another year and as I write this we are the throws of dealing with Omicron and hopefully the last variant we'll see.  Hoping that 2022 will be prosperous and ripe with change.  I mention change because in most cases change brings opportunities!

I posted the paragraph below in last years blog.

Last year I made one of my predictions that Aliens would make first contact in the 2021.

Thank goodness the Aliens did not join us for our worldwide COVID19 event. Now all we have to worry about is the Doomsday Glacier.

Top Ten Copier & Imaging Industry Predictions for 2021

1.  For my good buddy Ray S.  Dubai ditches the paperless office initiative because of complaints from workers about excessive eye strain from the countless hours of staring at multiple display screens. End result is they may not have to worry if Doomsday Glacier prediction comes true .

2.  Buzzwords for 2022 are Post-Digital Age and Rapid Business Transformation.

3. Speed & Color Licensing will be the new normal as we enter the last quarter of 2021 for copiers with at least one of our manufacturers.  They will see the light and reduce the office style A3 devices to two MFPs.  One device will will be capable of speeds from 20-60 pages per minute and the other will offer 65 to 100 pages per minute.  The dealer can them configure any speed that the client desires and then offer a subscription service if the client needs color.

4. Ricoh to rebrand as a Global Professional Services Company

5. Xerox who is in need of an OEM copier manufacturer will make a purchase to acquire either Toshiba Tec, Sharp from Foxconn or KonicaMinolta.

6. One OEM Copier manufacturer will to only offering color MFPs

7.  One of the top four (Canon, Xerox, KonicaMinolta of Ricoh) will make a play for the purchase of Crowdstrike.

8. Diversification from the print industry will see Ricoh, Canon, KonicaMinolta, or Kyocera will start purchasing large regional MSP providers.

9.  The FBI will finally enter the USA market place to take on the likes of Xerox, Canon, Ricoh and KonicaMinolta.  Fuji Business Innovation could also make a strategic partnership with one of two mega dealers in the US.

10.  After almost 6 years with no refreshes it seems Ricoh will divest themselves from the AEC wide format business.

I enjoy writing these and please keep in mind that these predictions are intended to be more entertaining than factual.  But, you never know what tomorrow will bring.  Would love to hear comments!

-=Good Selling=-

This Week in the Copier Industry 5 Years Ago

First Week of January 2017

After a small Christmas, New Years and the end of 2021 Sales Event I'm ready to get back to more of our regular schedule.  However I'm off to the Executive Connection Summit on the 16th and returning on the 19th of this month.  I'm sure I'll have a ton of interesting information and can't wait to share it with our members.

Enjoy These Awesome Copier Threads from Five Years Ago

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