Tagged With "Ask Us Anything"
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Re: Perspectives on Riso
I know this isn't, most likely, the perspective on the actual usage of the riso's but we had looked at becoming a dealer when someone in our market went out of business. They were the only riso dealer in our market. I find it easy to sell against the riso unless someone truly needs 150 ppm and doesn't care about anything else. It seems I only see them in church's now where they are very old school and they say "that's just the way we do it and don't want to change." We decoded agaonst being...
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Re: Hiring Sales Reps - what are you hearing
Ex military is the most reliable bet. They have worked out great for us on the service side but haven't had the opportunity to try it in the sales side yet.
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Re: The End Of The Day With Ray! The MP and the Refugees
Thanks for sharing your story with us. It puts things in perspective. Stay safe.
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Re: The End Of The Day With Ray! Don’t Screw Up Your Defining Moment
I've got shut down customers asking how we can help them because they can't operate. It sucks for us but it sucks way more for them. I have "suspended" an MA for one because they asked" no cost no expense". I was lucky enough to get my PPP loan in on day one, approved and closed. I live to fight another day but I don't think things will change all that much. Americans are not going to change everything because of Covid 19, I may be wrong (wouldn't be the first time) but this is a major...
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Re: More than eight million pages printed by Coventry council in 2019
okay, who is going to do the match for the cost per page and the US dollar cost?
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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?
We definitely are not out chasing them but we are much more versed talking about them and the benefits of buying them from us rather than the big box store. It has led to some very nice MPS accounts for us this past year. I don’t have a final count but I believe we added about 3 million new clicks this year from printer sales. Not breaking any records by any means but adding an extra 50k or so of revenue never hurts. And thanks to brother for having a minimum advertised price online for the...
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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: What Do You Do When You Need Competitive Copier Specs?
i ALSO REMEMBER Better Buys for Business in the US! Ty for posting this
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Re: Your Copiers Are Storing Confidential Information: What You Can Do About It
We are still a dealer but we have not sold a LEXMARK in quite a while. They eliminated the MPS Elite program we were own, or at the least removed us from that program. I never had anyone ask about the security due to the Chinese ownership but it’s a great point. Honestly, I have found their support, to us at least, to be very subpar. Our support from brother has been phenomenal the last 2 years. Most of my printer clients are replacing the lexmarks with the brothers as fast as they can.
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Re: Those Magnificent Men and Their Copy Machines
Hey Art, Really admire your efforts in our industry and with your blog. Its been a long time resource to keep me updated in our industry. I will be celebrating 14 years at Martin Group, and was happy to see us represented in the list above. We are as enthusiastic as ever in supporting our communities, and below is a quick write up we refreshed to be current. Martin Group in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin: Is a regional power house in the office equipment community. With 35 years in the industry, and...
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Re: Scan to email gibberish
We've been getting calls regarding this issue as well, & the hotline's "fix" hasn't worked for us either.
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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: When is Net New Business not Net New Business?
We were staying away from Toshiba for a long time until we had a friend who could sell us parts, supplies, and give us manuals etc. those 4 figure contracts certainly do help. Seems few and far between but I'll take them when I can get them.
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Re: Toshiba now has tier based CPC's?
Ricoh hasn't even made us aware that those systems can do that.... I don't ever hear of anyone talking about the tiered rate. I wonder if, for once, everyone is on the same page and wants to keep it at a full page of color cost regardless. I hope it stays that way.
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Re: Toshiba now has tier based CPC's?
Our Ricoh SSS told us about it. I'd love to be the first one to push it & make everyone else react. Plus, it would improve profitability if we could charge a higher rate for higher page coverage.
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Re: Toshiba now has tier based CPC's?
Hi, we sell Toshiba in the UK. The current colour range can run with a two tiered counter already. We used to sell the Kyocera range with this feature it seemed to be good and won us business, but lost us money in service. When colour costs are dropping to 4p, the percentage of toner from the 4p is getting less. So to breaking this down into 3 tiers could seem marginal. But let say you could offer 1.5p for 2% coverage then 2.5p for 2-5% coverage and then 4p for above, you have now lost out...
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Re: Toshiba now has tier based CPC's?
In Canada, no such plan exits nor am I even aware the capability exists within Toshiba copiers. In my market, multi-tier pricing for color does not comes up in competitive pricing. For a 25 cpm, pricing seems to be holding steady at $0.010 Black and $0.070 color for single units. I have seen less and sometimes we move the cpc around a bit. For example, when we set up a copier we build the initial toner costs into our equipment costs. That gives us 32,000 colour pages to play with.
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Re: Ricoh & Epson = "perfect together" NOT!
They are never going to get their act together. I spoke with Jim Corridi at the CDA meeting several months ago and he told me big things were coming down the pipeline very soon because he agreed it would be hard to upgrade 3406WD systems with a 3406WD system. He also, however, acted like the Epson was going to be the latest and greatest thing for all of us that sell wide format. Not sure why since we don't typically mess with the ink jet machines. You can find the Epson's extremely cheap...
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Re: Ricoh & Epson = "perfect together" NOT!
We were talking with KIP but my father did not want to order 2 or 3 machines at one time for inventory like they wanted us to. I talked with Oce' and the guy was pretty much like talking to a wall and said he didn't need anymore dealers in his territory and pretty much hung up. I would like to have an alternative and not be at Ricoh's mercy. I have tried to upgrade 3406's with 3406's and it doesn't go over that well.
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Re: Ricoh & Epson = "perfect together" NOT!
We don't sell the Epson, I do hear that many Ricoh wide format dealers are looking to change. The W3602 is due out something this spring, Ricoh is waiting to exhaust inventories on the W3601. I have not sold a W3601 yet this year and believe I only sold a handful last year, I used to sell at least a dozen a year. The W3602 will have the GUI as the color systems and many of the same features, sad but the GUI and the MFP features will still put us way behind with the likes of KIP & Oce
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Re: Ricoh & Epson = "perfect together" NOT!
We are getting $.03 per sq ft. That is less than the monochrome machines, this is why I don't see us placing anymore new monochrome machines. We will place some refurbished ones to the customers that have to go low budget. Not only that it blows the Oce Colorwave away. We have a customer who makes these 20 ft full color GIS aerials that cost him $21.00 each to run on the Oce (his numbers not ours) we ran them on the KIP at a cost of $1.76.
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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: Canon C10000 Press
Pricing came out yesterday. I saw it a Graph Expo. Canon will begin shipping once a dealer has trained techs. For us, the first class available is end of this month.
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Re: Sharp bond risk jumps as losses over 4½ years top $10 billion
WOW! Some take ways from the article above: Sharp does not have core business that it can look to in the future 510 billion syndicated loan payment due March of 2016. That's almost 4.2 billion US dollars! Ouch! "The chances of banks calling the 103-year-old company’s loans are therefore low", seems to me like there are more cuts to come, more business units to sell. Banks accepted shares in the company earlier this year after it defaulted on debt payments
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Re: Kyocera SWOT
Kyocera Guy, Way to earn the title! Thanks, man. To give the rest of the P4P crew some food for thought, here is what I have so far: Strengths Emerging as Europe Market Leader, Could be Replicated in Other Regions Ceyoniq ECM Acquisition a Bold Move, Solutions Goal $332M to $830M by 2018 HyPAS Platform Well Respected, Hybrid Java/Web Services has Potential Solid US Dealer Channel, Strong Partner Relationships and Value Proposition A4 MFP and SFP Expansion Creating Extremely Comprehensive...
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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: Samsung Copier Million Page Test "A Tree Massacre"
On average for every tree taken down in US for paper it is replaced by three new ones This is one of the reasons there are more trees in US than in past Dan Schmidt (sent from mobile device) > On Nov 23, 2015, at 6:19 PM, Print4Pay Hotel < alerts@hoop.la > wrote: >
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Re: KonicaMinolta One Rate webinar Recording from 9/14/2018
Art, Can you please send me the Webinar recording? KonicaMinolta One Rate webinar Recording from 9/14/2018 Thanks, Ron Mouzakes, Jr. Client Executive US Direct Sales-Office Solutions-Enterprise Accounts Ricoh USA, Inc. Ricoh Global Services 500 Commack Rd, Suite 140 I Commack, NY 11725 Email: Ronald.Mouzakes@ricoh-usa.com Phone: 631-764-2705 I Fax: 212-202-5154 https://www.ricoh-usa.com/en/insights EMPOWERING DIGITAL WORKPLACES: RICOH IMPROVES WORKPLACES USING INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGIES &...
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Re: Up=Coming China Tariffs on Copiers parts & accessories
These are two listing that I found on ustr.gov site: 8443.99.20 Parts of printer units of subheading 8443.32.10 specified in additional U.S. note 2 to this chapter 8443.99.45 Parts and accessories of copying machines; nesoi Subheading 8443.99.20 following parts of printer units of subheading 8443.32.10: (a) Control or command assemblies, incorporating more than one of the following: printed circuit assembly, hard or flexible (floppy) disk drive, keyboard, user interface; (b) Light source...
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Re: Copier Parts & Accessories China Tariff Starts in 9 Working Days
More than a few copier/ printers are manufactured in Thailand and the Philippines due to low labor costs. I do not know but I think these products tend to be more low end A4 and printer products. I think most A3 product is made in China. I can only speak for Toshiba but I know the majority of North American toner is made in North Dakota. As I am from Canada, I am hoping with fingers crossed that this very likely US tariff war with China will not effect us.
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Re: Copier Parts & Accessories China Tariff Starts in 9 Working Days
" Whatever money the Trump Administration gave away to its citizens in its tax cuts of 2017 it is now going to claw back with higher taxes disguised as tariffs. " When one door closes another door opens. Many US companies can benefit from the higher tariffs placed on goods from China. In fact I spoke to one of those companies last Thursday. I disagree that the tax cuts are going to claw their way back with higher taxes disguised as tariffs. In the end, what Trump wants is fair trade practice...
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Re: Copier Parts & Accessories China Tariff Starts in 9 Working Days
Do you agree that a new 25% tariff on copier/ printer products imported from China is a consumption tax on US businesses and consumers?
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Re: Copier Parts & Accessories China Tariff Starts in 9 Working Days
Canada charges a 270% tariff because the US has a massive over supply of milk production. If US dairy product was to enter Canada without tariffs it would destroy our perfectly working dairy industry. Why should the USA be allowed to destroy our milk industry so as to partially solve a problem created within the USA? Besides, how do you think Canada maintains its "free" single payer health care system. It is by charging high taxes on all consumer purchases. I do not think that anybody thinks...
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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: Copier Parts & Accessories China Tariff Starts in 9 Working Days
All very good points. I'm guessing larger players might have more manufacturing site options. However, if their A3 are manufactured in say US and Korea but their A4 are largely China, there could be discrepency even within a single manufacturers ptoduct line. Another manufacturer could have the reverse.
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Re: Copier Parts & Accessories China Tariff Starts in 9 Working Days
Duties on Chinese goods started at 12:01 a.m. Friday in Washington, just after midday in China. Another $16 billion of goods could follow in two weeks, Trump earlier told reporters, before suggesting the final total could eventually reach $550 billion, a figure that exceeds all of U.S. goods imports from China in 2017. https://www.msn.com/en-us/mone...DxQ8?ocid=spartanntp
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Re: Copier Parts & Accessories China Tariff Starts in 9 Working Days
The Trump Administration today announced plans for a new round of $200 Billion worth of tariffs against China. https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/10...ffs-trump/index.html Copy machines were on the original list but but were taken off leaving parts and consumables subject to a 10% tariff. It seems most suppliers have not taken actions to increase their prices. On the new list which could go in effect sometime after Aug 30th are: 8443.39.20 Electrostatic photocopying apparatus, operating by...
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Re: Copier Parts & Accessories China Tariff Starts in 9 Working Days
"Tariffs have a way of redirecting business" Tesla announced yesterday plans to build a new car factory in Shanghai, China in part to escape potential US tariffs on auto parts and battery supplies. https://www.nytimes.com/aponli...-as-china-tesla.html I can only guess that it would take years and much capital and energy to start or relocate a new copier factory outside of China. The Philippines is currently an important manufacturing hub for A4 printers and MFPs due to low labor costs. Most...
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Re: Canon reveals new imageRunner range
The release date for the US is supposed to be August 1st. Now will we see them in August or will it be October......
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Re: Ricoh Profit down 85%, 3D printing plans on hold?
Wow!! 12% reduction in sales... I know it is the smaller half year but that seems really light. Something seems to be wrong with the $'s. 50% operating profit would kick off a celebration large enough for all of us to hear.
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Re: Manufacturer Support on Bids
Been ages since I posted anything on here! Jason, back in the day for me Canon didn't do anything unless it was minimum $50k wholesale. KM on the other hand was extremely aggressive with doing whatever was needed to get our wholesale price down. We also had a fantastic dealer account manager though who would go to bat for us every time. In a RFP situation, you would think they would understand that you are dropping your margins or more than you expect the manufacturer to. "Where there's a...
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Re: Manufacturer Support on Bids
For us it seems like any large opportunity is likely to qualify for a GPO of one sort or another.
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Re: Canon's new 75PPM A4 MFP series
As much as I am not a fan of A4, but realizing it’s our necessary evil, I hope they do. The A4 has for the most part killed it for us as sales people. We have to sell many more units to make the same revenue....revenue, I say....profit margin is good for the most part, but we still have to sell more united to keep everyone happy. Was the worst thing a manufacturer could do in my opinion.
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Re: Is This the Beginning of the End for the Padding of Lease Rates?
Hello Art and the rest of the P4P members - Our industry association (ELFA), along with several independent law firms that represent many of our industry members are reviewing this legislation to determine the actual effects it will have on the industry as a whole and to provide guidance so that our members will be in compliance with the legislation. What we know at this point is that is you are involved in offering financing to businesses in California, you will be subject to this...
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Re: Is This the Beginning of the End for the Padding of Lease Rates?
Part Two: Leasing News Exclusive: The Opposition and How Senator Steven Glazer Got SB 1235 Passed (Part 2 of 3) By Tom McCurnin Leasing News Legal Editor The bill was "Engrossed and Enrolled" and presented to the Governor at 5 p.m., September 12th, awaiting his decision to sign or veto. How He Pushed It Through the Legislature What are the takeaways from this interview and SB 1235? ▪ First , I Was Surprised at the Overwhelming Support of Trade Groups for the Bill. When he rattled off the...