In advance of our Print Analyze App (smart phones & tablets) that is scheduled for February 9th & February 15th, I asked Jean Francois LE BRIZE to provide me with the same story that he told me at my first webinar a few months ago.
Below is the blog from Jean:
There is not a lot of software aimed at the salesman in the Imaging business.
Among them, PrintAnalyze Full.
PrintAnalyze Full is a cloud solution: the Salesman can perform audits, retrieve meters, calculate a TCO, and make a first proposition. All this from a smartphone or tablet.
One day, a female District Manager I know was in pure prospection. Just as the rest of her team, she was assigned randomly some accounts with little information from the corporate CRM.
All she knew: she had to visit a little factory in the countryside, in the middle of nowhere. An ice cream factory. She had the name and address of the Company. In the corporate CRM: 2 little printing devices. Information probably outdated.
When she arrived, she asked the manager. She was received by the owner who said:
“I won’t have much time. I just bought this factory one month ago. In the same time, I also bought a similar plant 10 miles away. Plus the one I already have near the Coast. We want to be the ice cream leaders in the whole area. I have a lot of work to do… So, please, be quick.”
The real situation was completely different from what she thought. This company had changed in size and now, has 3 factories. Furthermore, not a big amount of time to convince the decision maker.
She saw a printer, opened PrintAnalyze Full and noted the cost per page for that printer from the embedded Database. Then she asked the owner “Sir, how many pages do you print in your 3 factories?” Our owner stated. "strictly no idea", the owner then call the accountant.
Five mins later, the accountant came in and said: “last year, we bought "x" reams of paper”.
For a seasoned sales rep, that was enough to make an assessment. Easy to multiply by the costs per page.
The District Manager said: “Sir, last year, you spent "x" amount of money in printing” to that printer I pointed out earlier. To say the least the owner was astonished that he spent that much!
She carried on, “I understand you have a lot of work right now but can we discuss it next week?” The owner agreed for another appointment.
She closed the deal some weeks later.
How She Used the Software
When she told me the way she used our software, it was exactly as in the comics, a bell rang in my head!
She used it as a pure prospection software! No audit, no proposition, just prospection.
Well, it all began with that sales call.
Technically speaking, we had already a lot of pieces of the jigsaw puzzle: Database, Cloud, Android, Apple, customized report sent by email...
We just added Text To Speech and presentations with the touchscreen to accentuate the Wow effect.
And some months later, we are able to present to you PrintAnalyze Lite.
I would like to thank this District Manager. Thank you Elizabeth!
Note from Art:
I've seen the App, I'm using the App and the App has already turned heads as to how quick I can assess printers & mfp's in the field. Pretty much, I had a distinct advantage over my competitors when engaging clients in the field. I like that!
-=Good Selling=-
It's Super Bowl Week! Denver or North Carolina? I'm picking Denver because of experience and their awesome defense. Take some time and review the threads from ten years ago.
About a week ago I reached out to my friends at 
First, let me state that what I'm about to post came from a long time P4P member. He emailed me a few minutes ago, in reference to a Ricoh America's Direct sales person that contacted one of his accounts via email and sent pricing via email. Our P4P member is a Ricoh dealer and has had this client for 7 years, in addition the entire MIF is owned by the dealer.
Two recent appointments with clients actually tested my knowledge of one of the obscure features of our multi-functional copiers. On one appointment with a tech saving client, he wanted me to tell him about every option that was listed for the Ricoh MP 3003SP. It was the old Feature, Advantage and Benefit for each of those options that were listed, until I arrived at the PictBridge option for the Ricoh.
While at another appointment with an existing Police Department, the Chief and I went over the features of a new color MFP. When I explained the PictBridge feature, he stated, "are you telling me that I can plug my camera into the copier and print the pictures?", I stated "yup". The Chief then proceeded to tell me that the department has digital cameras and they use them for parking violations. They take a picture of the parking violation, then print the picture and then bring the pictures to court if needed. "A picture paints a thousand words." in the courtroom he stated. 
Spring Break will start at 7AM on the 18th with breakfast, and at 8AM we'll from Dr. Steven Shepard of Shepard Communications with his key note address, "The Dance of Generations: Leading the Multigenerational Workplace." 
Reason Three: 
I think about back to our early days of being in business when we still operated out of my father’s house. There was a long, steep driveway to get to the house. When heavy snowstorms were forecast, it was impossible to get a car up and down the driveway. We were a very small company then, and did not qualify to have packages picked up from UPS. We had to bring our own packages to the UPS hub in Newark, New Jersey. We had this really bad blizzard in the winter of 1977. Mark Ruggieri, who still works with us today, was in high school and packed orders in the afternoon and got them delivered to UPS. Mark is one of our most dedicated employees, and he showed it early on that day. With nearly a foot of snow already on the ground, Mark went and got my brother’s sled out of the garage, and got all the boxes on the sled. He got the packages all the way down the hill, loaded into the car, and got them off to UPS, so they would be delivered to our customers on time!"
Other payable invoices are scanned when received and the index terms are automatically “read” from the document using Optical Character Recognition from third-party software vendor ABBYY
When looking at the specs for the by-pass tray, the minimum specs for Custom Size is: 3.55" x 5.83", thus we fall within the parameters of the minimum size. Funny, but A2 Envelopes is not even mentioned on the SP831DN brochure. I re-positioned the envelope to feed long edge first, then entered the specs of the envelope to the customer feed paper size for the by-pass tray.