Dave:
We thought of something quite similar at one of our weekly meetings.
The thought to establish a base price for cpc was a great idea. Here are our sticking points.
A. All new sales for systems would have to be under a monthly cpc plan. This means no more year plans for new customers. As older yearly MA's become available do they change over to monthly cpc's or do they now remain a "house account"? If they do convert to a monthly cpc, how can you justify an increase?
B. How do you organize and maintain the tracking of meter reads> My thought is that if everyone is under a monthly cpc plan that this would be a "no brainer". I quess this would be ok for the smaller dealer, but how about the mid size and the mega dealer. How do you administer such a plan. Here's my question. Does OMD have a solution for this? Can a program be writen for OMD, kets say an SDK kit? If so, when the monthly cpc is billed the meter and the billing can ne exported to a monthly report. We did not have the answer for this, nor have we done a follow up.
C. How do you cost justify a cpc charge for a fax and laser printer?
D. Also once you have this in place, now the harware systems really do become just a commodity, plus have you just made the solution selling the a commodity also?? Reps are no longer paid on boxes, but just clicks.
E. One Million clicks in my territory at .008 would equal $96K per year. Can the customer save that much by paying wholesale for the box?
I would tend to think a click charge overage could be an .002, that would mean that my territory would have to produce minmimum of 4 million clicks a month.
Since some HV users are currently at .005, ,0055 and .006, how do you justify a .002 increase. Or is there a sliding scale used for HV and LV users?
Lots of questions!
The idea that you have is a good one and if we talk more about it, we may have a plan that may be good to bring to the table.