Tagged With "Field Sales Rep"
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Re: What's the weirdest place you've sold a copier to?
Lol, those were two good ones! I can't remember if I've ever had weird sale.
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Re: All Ricoh A4 devices = no stapler
If it helps, Canon A4 staplers are usually around $900 whole sale.
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Re: All Ricoh A4 devices = no stapler
$650 on a B&W A4, $615 on a color A4. Ricoh is missing the boat one this one...
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Re: Post-Virus We Must Defeat The Zombie Companies!
Although I am 60% on board with your move to A4 strategy, most of the rest of the stuff you are posting is "knocking it out of the park"! I would like to see a poll. As a business owner, during COVID-19 would you prefer? 1). No lease payments for 90 days 2). 1/2 price lease payments for one year The auto industry is pushing no payments for 90 days but I think business owners are more concerned about cash flow for the next year. I think the correct strategy is to offer as part of your...
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Re: Post-Virus We Must Defeat The Zombie Companies!
We generally do not build in prepaid copy/ print blocks into our leases. We do give away free copy prints up front but only intended as a short term bonus. We do normally charge a $25.00 minimum monthly maintenance fee but have waived that until the economy rebuilds momentum. I am in Canada, lease vendors are currently offering 90 day payment deferrals added back on at the end of term for those customers who request them. Leases expire every month and customers are happy with the equipment...
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Re: Will outside Sales Rep's go away?
@Jason H it's my understanding that Canon has a rep dedicated to Amazon for the ImagePASS mfp's already
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Re: Will outside Sales Rep's go away?
ImageClass?? If so that’s throw away junk just like the HP’s etc. I believe that stuff has been sold online for some time now. We don’t sell that series due to the extremely high cpc’s
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Re: Will outside Sales Rep's go away?
@Monte I hope/think that even though buyers will research online that they will still want some interaction with a salesperson. If in fact the manufacturers allow the sale of high end MFP's online then the dealers will have to change a lot of how they do business. My hope though is that it does not come down to this. I buy a lot online and my wife grocery shops online and has them delivered to the house, BUT I don't look at most things like groceries. I want to go talk to my insurance agent.
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Re: Will outside Sales Rep's go away?
Even if they meet a rep, that doesn't mean that they won't oftentimes turn-around and order online. Building relationships and providing solutions is all good and I have accounts that I am very tight with. However, when the day comes that all the business I get is only from those accounts, I will starve.
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Re: Will outside Sales Rep's go away?
In a way its already gone to the internet and away from the outside sales rep........at least for stand alone printers and A4 devices. If all someone needs is a printer or an A4 to be used for basic printing,scanning and copying.....face it, they really don't need us already. If you've been at this a long time you probably remember the days when you sold a lot of A4 machines to small offices. 20 years ago if you needed an A4 you called a copier dealer. Those days are gone for the most part.
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Re: Will outside Sales Rep's go away?
@fisher I agree almost completely, but to play devils advocate I will say that we are selling more desktop printers now than we ever have before. Mostly brother, as we became a partner a couple years ago. I think people are looking for reps to show them a better way than just buying another HP off amazon, but the rep still has to have a higher level conversation with the client...not just hey buy your printers from us.
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Re: Will outside Sales Rep's go away?
I believe it will be a mixed environment, just like with PC's and other peripherals. For the small number of placements, onesie-twosie, I see E-commerce and inside sales taking over the role of the outside sales rep. For the larger accounts a sales rep will continue to play a role.
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Re: Will outside Sales Rep's go away?
In 10 years there WILL be outside sales reps, and many of them will be the committed, true professionals of today. The E-Commence platform have changed our business and how we do it. For example gone are the days when you could duck into a 15 story office building and cold call. But electronic format can still be your attention getter and facilitate your efforts in creating interest. I can buy anything on line and cut out the sales person. Try doing your own investing and getting the right...
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Re: Quality Digital Office Technology
Art, we've got a rep that covers York / Gettysburg and he confirmed this. He said he heard it went down ~ 6 months ago and they started reaching out to clients towards the end of 2019 to let them know. Gonna be a big change as Quality had a lot of loyal clients (also were giving away service at rates like .003 & .032- > I've gotta imagine that'll change quickly)
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Re: Ricoh Pro C5300
I tried to get more details from my Ricoh production rep, he tells me more info will be available towards the end of the month and that was it, hoping for some big changes, especially in the LCT area.
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Re: 7 Deadly Topics from 7 Deadly Sinners at Top 100 Summit (Part One)
Is it just me, it seems that the general rule of thumb for the copier industry to end users is "the take or leave approach". Meaning, come hell or high water we're not going to change the way we bill, the way we support, or the financial solutions that we offer. While I was at the Top 100 conference, a rep from Wells Fargo spoke about the billing options that they now have in their leases. One of the options was for seat billing for managed IT services. My thought is that if it's available...
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Re: When is Net New Business not Net New Business?
Interesting perspective. We constantly have the talks about competitive machines we took on service, especially brands we don't carry. I tend to consider is taking a Konica on service and then a year or two later upgrading it to our equipment net new business from the sales side. Obviously we had net new business on the service side but not net new for "x" with the equipment sale. I'd be interested to hear how others see this. I hear a lot of people say it doesn't matter but if I bring a...
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Re: When is Net New Business not Net New Business?
I was wondering if the subject of those customers who were acquired through service was going to come up, & Jason's comment is certainly "food for thought"... In his example, he brought on the service customer (with the obvious intention of upgrading them at the first opportunity) & the dealer gets a contract & machine sale that they otherwise wouldn't have. Sounds like net new to me. In my experience, though, most of these service to machine sale conversions are from customers...
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Re: When is Net New Business not Net New Business?
Jay, We typically go after about any machine other than a Xerox. If someone wants us to service their machine and its not a complete piece of junk we will take it on and will get parts and supplies from dealers etc. until we can upgrade to one of our lines; Savin, Canon, or Samsung. We expect our reps to go out and take service agreements and we pay them the first months billing. Most don't like to mess with 30.00 agreements but they add up and eventually you find a big one. We had a rep who...
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Re: Ricoh & Epson = "perfect together" NOT!
Call that KIP sales Rep again and make a deal with him. If you can get the deal with 2 KIP 9900s (those will replace the 4 Oce's), then you get to be a KIP dealer. He will also spend half as much in toner as those Oce machines just eat toner.
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Re: Nsi Autostore
Art, the big thing is for Nuance/Copitrak do this you need external tablets, and people are pretty sick of ecopy. We embed right in the MFP for Ricoh, Konica, Canon and Xerox so even if there's too many months left in the current lease we can embed the software in the current equipment and then just move the license to your MFPS when it's time to change hardware. I just did that with a POA rep in Denver, the customer had Canons and when they're ready switch we'll move it for a very small...
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Re: Charge for IT support
We had never charged for it after the sale until about 6 months ago due to people calling all the time for driver installs, scanning issues related to their internet etc. We used to offer an optional network/it yearly agreement and people would decline and then start calling for help. We decided to send out, initially an opt-out to ever customer who had current devices, and after every sale send one out. We did it as an opt out due to the fact that customers would decline the option and...
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Re: up against the Xerox Phaser 7800 with a SP C831dn
Thanks and congrats on your sale and the others. Also thank you for the link and your advice. The company is a small design firm and I don't think they go all out with the Pantone matching and that calibration tool. I will let you know if I sell it.
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Re: The Death Of The B2B Salesperson [Infographic]
Art, I call Bull ****! At least for our industry, the copier industry! This may be true of a commodity (like envelopes, or coffee, or even a PC) but copiers, really MFDs require a lot of attention, both before and after a customer buys it. This article seems to be written by an old brick & mortar company that successfully transitioned to internet sales. This will work for any company that drop ships their products. And I agree that the MFD manufacturers would LOVE for this to be, or...
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Re: Why Social Selling Stinks for Most Copier Sales Reps
Art, love this! You know my take on the integration of social into the sales process. Sales requires hard work as most will not put forth the effort. The reason why ones social anything stinks is their effort, plain and simple. Operating with an analig mindset in a digital world = death blow to a sales rep.
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Re: Color clicks
JWS- Good luck getting your machine to count correctly! We went round and round with Ricoh and our rep about this. They swear it counts correctly, we know it doesn't. You are correct in that it can be application- dependent; some apps will click correctly, but Acrobat prints, when there are mixed originals, usually treat the whole job as color. I experimented with different drivers (PCL / PS3 / Universal PCL), but could never resolve the issue for our client (a church). BTW, the ame doc...
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Re: Copier Parts & Accessories China Tariff Starts in 9 Working Days
I suspect that you are retired from the copier industry and do not have to earn commissions each month to support your family. As an active sales rep, I do not have the luxury of hoping that things will run their course when I have budgets and quotas to meet each month. The people who are going to be adversely effected will be US copier sales reps with a higher cost of goods.
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Re: Top Ten "Why Copiers Should Have Warning Labels"
Ty Jason! Had fun with this!! Ty for the email about your rep, that was very humorous sale!! Maybe post in on the forums?
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Re: Sales And Branding Must Get Married, And Larry Levine Is The Priest
What is a recovering copier rep?
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Re: Sales And Branding Must Get Married, And Larry Levine Is The Priest
Art, you will figure it out one of these days!
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Re: Sales And Branding Must Get Married, And Larry Levine Is The Priest
Do you mean former copier rep? The only way I can see myself as former is when I retire. Recovering almost sounds like selling copiers was a "bad thing"?
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Re: Manufacturer Support on Bids
I agree. My KM rep and his boss were in the office yesterday and I asked him why he didn't show any interest in this opportunity and he said because you are buying at the lowest I can give you right now and there is nothing else I can do from a support part. He said he gave it about a 3-5% chance of winning the account based on what he read and what he could do. I am ok with that as most of our bid opportunities are not set up around here for dealers to participate. They always have some...
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Re: A Halloween Tale of an A3 Copier’s Death
What is even more scary is how your commission cheques will fall in $ value if you only sell A4 copiers. The copier/printer market is not getting any larger and if a commission sales rep focuses on selling lower $ value A4 boxes, they are going to have to make a lot more sales calls and sell a lot more boxes to earn the same money.
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Re: The A4 Challenge or Opportunity
In my experience A4 machines are as much or even more hassle than an A3 machine to install and train which I do myself for the customer but my income off of the sale of the A4 device is a fraction of what it would have been had I sold an A3. Beyond that most A4 machines lack a document feeder built to handle the page volumes of walk up copying and scanning my customers do. At the end of the day I have to make a living so I spend my time on A3 opportunities.
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Re: Senior VP wants P4P Access!
Given that he tried to register with false info, I'm concerned. This is a business site, not a personal site where limiting the amount of personal information shared is an appropriate privacy measure. You'll recall that I already ran into a situation once on this very board a few years ago where I did not feel I could be candid because of a manufacturer's response. If a manufacturer rep wants to post, then he/she should be totally honest and above board with their information and their...
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Re: Is selling at cost the future for print hardware?
Interesting approach to the sales process. Strikes me the next promo is for 10% below sticker price...of course unlike cars, manufacturers don't put a sticker price on MFP's to advise the public what the price is supposed to be. At this point we find the margin we are able to obtain on most sales of hardware barely covers the cost of sales for the product...any business profits come from services bundled around the hardware, either connectivity plans, support plans, supplies for colour etc.
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Re: A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Copier Demo/Appointment
Rep: What's your copier volume? Client: Well, uh, everyone in the office uses it.
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Re: A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Copier Demo/Appointment
Had a demo years ago on a fax machine. Had a big wheel from corporate wanting to do a ride along with a rep for the day. Customer wanted to see quality and asked one of their customers to send a test fax. As all the admin complained about the speed, the corp guy explained that a very detailed fax would take more time because of memory issues. As everyone crowded aroud the fax to innspect, a very vivid porn image was reproduced with striking detail. We made the sale
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Re: Is selling at cost the future for print hardware?
Not true. But car dealers routinely "train" using whatever version of the truth they think will make a sale.
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Re: Scan in One City, Print in Another
The mind boggles! So the customer has the software applications that you reference and you are trying to find them a 'cheap' 'solution'......? Why? They have spent tens of thousands of dollars on those applications..all of which enhance their productivity as a law firm. You have a comprehensive solution to leverage (i.e. make work better!) each of their committed software applications and you think it might be 'expensive'? Come on, you have done more than most competitors simply by the fact...
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Re: Matt Espe named CEO of Ricoh Americas Corp
Not only that if you look back on posts from the P4P Hotel, Ikon was buying back stock 6-8 months prior to the sale, insider trading at it's best!
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Re: Ricoh Ikon Letter
Old Glory, you are way off-base regarding profitability to Ricoh on an $8,000 sale through the dealer or through their direct channel. When Ricoh sells to the dealer, the dealer is responsible for all ofthe end-marketing expenses related to the brick-and-mortar + sales rep expenses. When Ricoh (or other mfrs) run their own branches, there is a tremendous amount of overhead associated with that operation. Hence, this is one reason why Ricoh's dealer division, while smaller, was the only part...
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Re: Ricoh Ikon Letter
I think we make an error when we assume that Ricoh selling a machine to an end user for $8k is the same as Ricoh selling a machine to a dealer for $8k. When Ricoh sells a machine to a dealer for $8k they are done, when Ricoh sells a machine to an end user for $8k they have other costs, including paying the street rep and his manager so I don't think it is not true to say the $8k is the same to Ricoh from either source.
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Re: Are Step Leases ethical business practise?
Are we on the same wave length here?? Usually a 3-5 means that service and supplies are provided for three years, after three years the customer then has to pay for service, thus raising the cost to them. ie: $100 per month for 60 months includes 3 years of supplies and service for 100K, after the third year or whenever the supplies and service expire, the rep will come back in and refi the remaining 24 months with a new 3-5, they can usually sell this at a lower price that what the customer...
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Re: Are Step Leases ethical business practise?
Not only are the less than ethical copier sales people in the world, there are just as bad Lease sales people. When these two parties collude together the customers best interests are never at the top of the list. You cannot assume that the good Lease sales rep you work with has the same personal value system as the competition. You cannot assume that the good lease company you work with has a good local sales rep. You cannot assume that at the end of the lease, the Lease sales person you...
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Re: Are Step Leases ethical business practise?
Depending on the Lease vendor, they may provide cleverly designed Lease documents, with two payments streams on the document. The bad copier sales person fills in the agreed Payment #1 amount with the customer and leaves the Payment #2 line blank. The customer does not even see Payment #2 because it is blank. The customner signs the lease. Back at the office, this same sales person fills in Payment #2 with the Step Lease amount, and submits it to the Leasing company. Working with a less than...
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Re: Time in business requirements
The leasing company makes money when and if they are paid back, not when they lend the money! The rep is always free to cosign the loan if they think it's a BS issue but I think it would suddenly become a REAL issue at that point. After all, at that point we'd be talking about REAL money, not OPM. The leasing company is just wisely refusing all businesses under two years, then looking at the credit app and seeing that there is basically nothing on the app to support the loan, so they request...
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Re: Time in business requirements
Cash Gap: Going back to the past and seems like you've been in the biz for a long time. There was a time when: If you were over 2 years in biz, 90% of the time no PG was required. The leasing companies that you did business with would not "cream" the apps, they would take the good, the bad and the ugly (well, sometimes with the ugly) Problem now, is that all leasing companies want the cream, and that's where I have an issue, if you want first dibs to our portfolio, don't cream the apps, and...