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.
Monte posted:Hello All,
Interested in your opinion. In 10 years do you think there will be outside Sales Reps doing what we do? I suspect a more educated buyer will source via web and soon an ecommrce platform will replace us. Am I parinoid?
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 long term result. I would hate to find my home or business under/wrong insured because I went to an on line policy vending machine. When the need is significant, a true pro and the value they provide outshines ordering from a site.
10 years from now the churners will be thinned out, if they are there to just catch a renewal. The MFP will continue to impact each employee within a company and the committed outside sales rep who truly helps and organization maximize an organizations greatest resource (PEOPLE) will flourish.
The position will continue to afford people an opportunity to build a most exciting, rewarding, and interesting career. Understand your clients business, their priorities, and what keeps your DM up at night.
I’m a little late to this party but had the thread open since it was posted. As a 35 year old i straddle the “millennial” and old school gap (in my opinion haha). There is value of ordering things online that can be commonly used or even basic electronics. But if it’s anything above basic, I still believe talking to someone even if on the phone, pays dividends. We recently bought a new vehicle for my wife and explored for weeks online our options, the new vehicles options, what the price range was, anything you could think of. Then we went silently armed with this information to the local Ford dealership. We told the guy what we’re wanted, what we had looked at online and what we’re the must haves. We didn’t divulge prices found or our final number. What we found was a great experience with the salesman checking every box and coming in LESS than online prices.
I believe online will cut out a good portion of the sleazeball salesman still in our industry. An educated buyer will have a little bit of an idea of what’s going on and what they want, but also know that there’s service, setup and an ongoing relationship involved that needs to be considered. The truthfulness of these remaining salesman will have them continuing to be successful and maintaining a happier client base. The big box store mentality will continue to erode peoples confidence in those large corporations, HOPEFULLY pushing more business to the Indy channel.
it could be our geography (central Pennsylvania) but people still want to do business with local people. One thing we try to do is stress the service and install side (probably like everyone else) but in regard to those Canon products Monte referenced he stays away from (A4, scanners, wide format), we push the small difference to buy local and have our team do the install. More than not we win theS deals, albeit at much smaller margins, but it’s a victory in our column and not the resellers.
for the sake of my career and livelihood, I hope we’re still around in 10 years with a still mature but evolving marketplace. If not, I’m an ok burger flipper 😁
I'll chime in. Like TML I'm in my early 30's and have been selling copy hardware for nearly 10 years. I think good sales people as a whole are quickly becoming scarce. Millennials don't seem to like to interact with others if they don't have to and as most "print" decisions move to IT, online buying is already what they know. Overall it is a convenience factor, they don't have to submit a form to a website and wait a couple days for salesperson to try and up-sell them to an A3 MFP. They click a button and 2 days later there is a box at their door.
My example is this: My 60 year old father-in-law is a good ol' local homeboy and always talks about buying local...loves his local spots (cafe, repair shop, etc.) Well this past weekend I stop by to see a huge snowblower sitting in a crate in his front yard. He had bought a $1000 snow blower from Amazon. Now personally, I would have bought it from my local hardware store, had them assemble it and delivery it (and probably pay the same price.) But here is a "Boomer" that couldn't use his smart phone 2 years ago, that bought a large purchase on Amazon instead of local.
I doubt I will be selling copiers in 10 years but things are good right now so I'll ride it out until I can't any longer.