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Way Back When "We Did it Our Way" Selling Copiers

Today, I had to get some tires replaced and when you're on the road as much as I am, well.......I have a tendency to not clean my car as often as I'd like to. But, today was one of those days to find old faded toll receipts, a dried up banana peel, some forgotten business cards and a copier prospect card from 1992!  Now, my car is not 21 years old and I'm really at a loss how the card got there, but it brought me back to my "golden" era of selling copiers.

 

In 1992 I was 32 years old and running my own Adler Royal & Copystar copier dealership out of Atlantic Highlands, NJ.  We had some desktop computers but they were mostly used to letters and keep the accounting part of the business up to date. I can remember that we used Peachtree accounting software and for the life of me I can't remember the word processing software.

 

What I do remember is the prospect index cards, my prospect box (it was orange), and the index field tab cards.  We had an index tab card for each month of the year.  When we cold called in the field or called from the telephone we would fill out a prospect card and when we got a lead or generated a hot prospect.  We would then hand write what we spoke about, the type of copier that they had, the contact information and the date and time that we spoke with the prospect. Following up was just a matter of putting the card in one of the future months, thus if the month was June and the prospect wanted a call in three months, we would then forward the card to the month September and mark the day of the week that we needed to follow up. If you took sloppy notes or put the card in the wrong month there was always the possibility that you would lose the opportunity! 

 

Before I had my dealership I worked as a sales rep for a Minolta dealership and looking back there was a five sales guys, we were all in our mid twenties and I could tell some stories about what we did to alleviate the stress of selling!!  As new sales guys rotated in and old ones rotated out there was always someone looking to swipe the their index (prospect card file box). 

 

These were the days that if we had no appointments we would load a copier in the car and go cold calling, we were hawking to find the right prospect to do a demo on the spot and we used every close possible to have the order signed, get the check and return to the office without the copier. My how times have changed. There were was no CRM software, there were no rules, you just knew that you needed to make the touches to find the prospects, whether by grabbing the yellow pages and calling right down the list or knocking on doors.  Funny back then the script was kinda like this:  Hi this Art and I'm with Copy Machine Specialists, who am I speaking with? HI so and so, the reason for my call is to see if your company is interested in a plain paper copier? If there was a yes, we would schedule the appointment and if there was a NO we would dial the next number (and we didn't have to ever call them back!!).

 

Yes, things have changed, but I can remember some really good tricks we used to play on each other in the sales room (like unscrewing the handset on the mouth piece of the telephone and then screwing the plastic cover back on, the rep would start making calls and would only hear on the person on the other end saying hello, hello, is anyone there and in the mean time the rep was screaming in to the mouthpiece of the phone), indeed it was a great time to sell.

 

Don, John, Kelvin, Matt & Kathy we had some great times.....

 

=Good Selling=-

 

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Images (2)
  • 1992 prospect card back
  • 1992 prospect card front

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