Tell me if I'm going crazy, but are you finding it harder and harder to maintain decent margins or GP?
Seems like every office equipment dealer now has special comp plan for attracting net new business. It's the sales war that we really don't talk about, but each one of us knows that there's someone out there that's willing drop to get that net new client. I could go off on a tangent about plans to keep existing clients, but that's a blog I'll save for another day.
How does one find a client that's willing to pay for value? I hate to use the word "solution", but if you can solve a clients problem or pain with a piece of hardware or accessory, isn't that a solution?
For those that are not students of the imaging industry (multi-functional copiers), they have no clue of third party accessories that can help a client solve an existing problem. Right, accessories are going to help me?
First let's tackle some pain points for copier dealers and our special clients that lease or buy our copiers.
Types of companies:
Companies that manufacture concrete items
Quarry companies
Companies that manufacture wood products (furniture manufacturers)
Companies that manufacture candy
Companies that manufacture starch
Companies that manufacture glue
Companies that are located near a desert
Companies that produce textiles
What do They Have in Common?
Each one of these companies create and excessive amount of dust! Dust can kill a copiers performance, drain service revenues and sour the client on your brand because copiers can't deal with dust!
Years ago I was called out to a concrete company that was in need of new copiers. When I had my first look at those copiers. I'm thinking, dang these copiers are covered with dust. What am I getting myself into, my service department will shoot me!
Pain
Okay, so we remember pain points right? What's the pain with these copiers?
A. They don't make good prints or copies
B. The client is replacing the copiers every two years
C. The client has been threatened that their maintenance contract does not cover abuse (dust).
D. The copiers are always mis-feeding or jamming
Do you remember or every heard of dot matrix printers?
If so, you'll remember that many of those printers were quite noisy because of the impact printing that they performed. Clients wanted a solution to reduce or eliminate the noise. The solution was to sell the client a printer cabinet. Think of that cabinet more like a desk that enclosed the printer and had ports to allow for electric and the paper to flow in and out of the printer. We sold quite a few of these back in the day.
Let's get back to that dust issue for copiers
GOOD NEWS! Today there is a company that manufacturers dust enclosures for copiers! These dust enclosures are good for the copier dealer because eliminating the dust will improve performance, reduce service calls and eliminate pre-mature parts failure.
Clients will benefit from the elimination of mis-feeds and jams, ensure that they can get more than two years of service from each copier, ensures that a dealer will not drop the maintenance agreement, and print and copy quality will be acceptable.
GP
Remember that word GP and margin? That dust cabinet can be the difference from you getting the order over a competitor. In addition you get to hold or increase GP or margins because you're offering a value to your client. Reminds me of an order I had last year for a specialty product. I had almost $40K GP for selling two devices. Why did I get the order? Because I was the only one who knew about the solution to ease the pain of the client (another blog for another day).
Above is the picture of the copier dust cabinet. It's now up to you to click the link and find out more about Copier Solution Shop and their dust cabinet.
Anyone else have an interesting stories about a special or unique order? Would love to hear some!
-=Good Selling=-
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