It was the first snow of the season in New Jersey, the snow was short lived and didn't stick to the road surface as I drove to the office.
Today's agenda was to meet two Ricoh Product Marketing Reps from Japan along with the Wide Format Product Manager here in the US. Our day was prescheduled to meet with three wide format accounts that had either the CW2200SP and or the W3601. I had three appointments scheduled however once cancelled at the last minute.
Our first appointment has us visiting a Land Surveying company in the New Jersey Bayshore area, where we were able to interview the staff on what they like and how they use the CW2200SP.
I'm no stranger to these types of appointments, in the past I've been able to do these two other times for duplicators and one for wide format many years ago.
I always find these appointments fascinating, for one I get to meet new people, two I get to listen to their line of questioning to the customer (which can sometimes clue me in to new products that may come down the road), and of course the most important is that I have an audience with the manufacturer and can either state the ineffiencies of a certain device, or recommend improvements for future devices.
For lunch we went the Famous Bahrs Landing in Highlands where I was also able to catch up with Jay and his father (owners) and have an awesome lunch.
Our second appointment was at a large architectural firm near Red Bank. Our customer their has had a Ricoh W3601 for about 18 months (before PW), and basically the same line of questions were in order for that customer also.
I did have time to grill them on future products and since I don't have these products to sell now it's kind of worthless to talk about what may or may not happen. But, I was able to add what I'd like to see in future products.
- On the CW2200SP & the CW3601 there are three or four original guides that protrude from the rear of the system. I would like to see these extended so originals would stack and lay flat when they are scanned.
- For both systems again, give us the ability from the MFP screen to browse folders on the network and scan directly to that folder.
- For the W3601, give us USB print. The USB print works like a charm with the CW2200SP and would be a great addition to low volumes users so that they would not have to purchase a print controller. Especially good for customers that only need to print .pdf
- Both the CW2200SP and the W3601, enable printing from Mobile devices.
- W3601, develop a vertical stacker for the rear exit system. Prints would still exit to the bottom tray, however there would be no misfeed issues. This is big because I believe many W3601 users are send out larger jobs because both exit areas can't stack that well, especially the bottom tray. The end user actually agreed and stated that if Ricoh had something like they would send less print outs, thus more clicks for the factories. Adding a third party stacker like the Tameran is not an option in many companies since the foot print is so large.
I'll be back to selling tomorrow, however today was a pleasure and both of my accounts enjoyed the opportunity to talk about their business and what they would like to see in future systems
-=Good Selling=-
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