Skip to main content

Death of the Copier Salesperson


Having been in the industry for 25 years, I have seen many sales people come and go. Ours is a tough road to pave on a consistent basis, some come into the industry and light a fire in the first few months and then they seem to fall off the wagon. Then there are the seasoned veterans with 10+ years of experience, salespeople who know what they are doing and were doing it right and they fell off the wagon. What is it? What makes most beginners and seasoned veterans lose their touch, their skills or their enthusiasm?

Some of the newbies I’ve seen come and go were force fed with leads and accompanied by managers at the start of their copier sales career. Most of them had the art of communication but just lacked the product knowledge. When accompanied by their manager these newbies excelled, or was it the manager that excelled?

What about the seasoned sales people that had stellar sales cycles and then loses it. I have seen some of them lose it forever and just decide to get out of the industry altogether.

Most of us on the Print 4 Pay Hotel knows what it takes to sell on a daily basis; they are the ABCs of selling in any industry.

I will touch my own experiences in the field and experiences from others in the industry, it’s more or less what not to do to kill a salesperson.

Our job is not easy, I spend many countless hours researching account volume history, service history and the costs they have incurred over the life cycle of their piece of equipment. For some, selling the customer is easy (great closers), for others they must rely on grunt work, crunching the numbers and making them happen for the customer and presenting the customer with effective ROI’s. Sometimes, it gets old when you have negotiated with the customer, closed the sale and then have to negotiate with management to secure the order. I realize most of this will probably only happen on the dealer side of the channel. However, this tends to be on the top of my list.

Industry Trends: Not all but most Managements inability to know current industry trends, whether they are cpc’s, or document technology. Your competition, what they are doing and how they are marketing themselves. Management that cannot change on a dime or Management that has not done their homework with new technologies and services that can be offered. Management has a tendency to move slowly. I’ve noticed that there are many proactive dealerships that are putting the time and money into becoming the leader Dealers in the merging technology of copiers, printers and document management. Management more than ever needs to be experts in the industry, they need to eat, sleep, and breathe all aspects of the industry.

Vertical Market Selling: New salespeople are not focusing on vertical market applications or selling. Too many dealerships give their salespeople Carte Blanch and let them sell every product to every market! This creates a sales person that does not have enough product or solution knowledge to be effective in selling for gross profit. Gross profit is needed for the health of the dealership! The salesperson is then forced to selling boxes on price rather than solving a problem for a customer or saving them time with new technologies and software.

Training: Many dealerships offer little or no training at all. How can we put people on the street and ask them to sell solutions or be successful when they must decipher the products, features, advantages and benefits on their own time? Time is the key element in sales, time is needed to prospect effectively and find the customers who are ripe for the new services and products that dealerships offer. A true sales person prospects by day and quotes by night!

Selling: Owners in small to mid-size dealers selling machines or taking leads when there are capable sales people to handle the business. Selling Owners must get out of the selling business and focus on financing and marketing of their company. From a first hand experience from two different dealerships, I’ve seen Selling Owners not focus on their business! Taking leads away from competent salespeople and either making the sale or not. Talk about killing someone’s ego, or hurting them financially, nothing lowers the moral more than a salesperson finding out the owner took a lead in that territory. Owners (as long as they have a sales staff) need to focus on vendor or bank financing, expanding profit margins and the marketing of their company.

Commissions: More salespeople come and go because they do not get paid on time or the rules are changed during sales cycles. Some salespeople are paid commissions monthly, some bi-weekly and others earn bonuses either at the end of the sales quarter or the sales year. Changing pay schedules or changing how and when commissions are paid whether it starts bi-weekly and migrates to monthly or the other way around has got be one of the most frustrating times for sales people. Most of us earn 80% of the money we make in commissions or bonuses, changing or upsetting the commission flow may and can cause financial woes with any salesperson. Make a plan and stick to it.

Salespeople: Most sales people in our industry treat the job as a 9-4; most will blame someone else when they lose a sale or a customer. Most will never achieve their quarterly or yearly sales quotas. Most will find a job outside of the industry. Most of them could not care less what happens in their industry after 4PM in the afternoon. Most of them find time to hide and say they are producing work. Most of them will not last two quarters in this business.

Yet there are many that are on top of their game and continue to further their knowledge to support themselves and their family and a lot of them make a very good living in the office equipment industry.

My article started out as to how a salesperson can “die” in our industry. How stellar achievers that were once on top were now designated to the trash heap or decided to leave their company for greener pastures. I fell like this story is more about the typical grind that we go through on a day-to-day basis. The great high’s we can get when we’ve closed a deal that we’ve been working on for months or years or the feeling when you meet someone for the first time and get the order that day, plus getting the price you deserve. Why is it when a customer needs info or a quote we call them ASAP and get them the information RIGHT AWAY. Then after trying to close the customer on numerous occasions you get an answer from the customer stating that they’ll call you in a week. Well it’s been five damn years and I’m still waiting for you to call me back!

In order not to let a salesperson die, companies need to focus on where their company wants or need to go. From there they need to give direction to the sales team for monthly, quarterly or yearly goals. Goals need to focus on new accounts, satisfied accounts and referrals from old accounts.

Speaking to one of our techs today, we spoke about the new equipment and how far we are removed from the analog copiers of five years ago. We're actually selling document delivery & reception systems.

We all agreed and thought about how far we have come in the last five years.


Art Post
Last edited {1}
Original Post

Replies sorted oldest to newest

Great job Art!

I really enjoyed it.

I would like to add;

Ownership making up it's mind! The days of huge margins are over. Please choose do you want to grow the base and take market share, or focus on just the profitable accounts and make the CDA percentages look great! I know it would be wounderful to have both--but lets be honest, it's one or the other. So just choose, and let's move on, so we can focus on a common goal.
Good posting Art!

Been there and done that! Declining margins when I was selling machines a few years back was frustrating. My dealership saw plenty of turnover. The new reps simply had a really hard time developing enough business fast enough to stick with it and many seasoned reps did not want to change their way of doing business.

Want higher margins? Do what I started doing over five years ago. Bundle hardware and document management software. It's so darn easy to ask a prospect what they are doing with all their paper and hand them a Document Management Questionnaire. Unfortunately many sales reps make it hard, just like I did when I started. There is an underlying fear that introducing an electronic document management solution is going to lengthen the sales cycle or is going to be too hard and time consuming to learn. NOT!

Having come from the copier business I wanted to build a software solution business that caters to copier sales reps. We feel your pain because we experienced it. Our software bundled with your hardware can dramatically increase your sales and net margins, quickly. I know, because that's what I did and it worked great. This is why I got out of ther copier sales biz and into the software development/distribution biz. I started bundling document management software with my hardware in 1999 and saw my sales and margins begin to increase immediately. I figured if I could do that anybody could. Now we provide very cool, easy to learn, easy to present, priced right document management software and a program designed specifically to help sales reps start making sales qucikly. No developer/distributor will treat you like we will. Fast response, great collaterals, customer demonstartations for your customers to help you close deals while you learn and more.

If you are concerned about the time it takes to learn how to demo and sell software, think about the soft margins Art talked about and re-consider. I knew nothing about document management software when I started selling it.

Today most reps know a heck of a lot more than I did and the equipment available it 100 times better, but many reps are simply are not working this very profitable opportunity. Ignorance was bliss at that time. I learned real fast because sales started escalating and margins atarted increasing.

Today VircoSoft provides training sessions, collaterals and salesrep-friendly materials that will make demononstrating a snap. Invest some of your time and we'll help you get a fast start.

Love to hear from you! You could be selling and earning more this month.

Steve Breault
VircoSoft Corp.
(703) 385-0101
sbreault@vircosoft.com
VircoSoft Web Site
Document management solutions and software are definitely a way to add value to the sale. However, they are reserved for the advanced salesperson.

I've found at my company that the best way to avoid the copier salesperson funeral is to sell more units.

Granted, software can help you separate yourself as a consultant and receive more referral business. But the whole idea is to capture more clicks, otherwise it's a short pay day for the company. And, when a good company grows, so does its sales force.

I feel that most salespeople need to improve on the basics more than anything else. Prospecting, qualifying, closing. When they are proficient in these area, the rest is icing on the cake.

There's no shortcut to successs. It's still "99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration".
I would add record keeping to the list. If your only hope for sales come from calls you've recently made, most of your time has been waisted. You can make every call valuable if you keep good records on what you learn. Then you need a system that brings that account to your attention at the most opportune time. If you learn that an account has 18 months left on a 36 month lease, you must have a system that sees to it that the next opportunity at that account doesn't slip through the cracks.
Awesome posts to all!

I would also like to add - tenured or non-reps... The days of selling to people who are in the market and keeping margins are over! As stated earlier. If you bring people into the market, you can not only hold good margins but more important, have a much higher closing ratio thereby ensuring a complete return on your investment of time.

tenured reps are mixing in repeat business there they are bringing the customer into the market or talking to them early enough in the buying cycle that it yields the same result- limited or no competition.

So you ask- "How do I, regardless of tenure and current account base- has a deadly success rate with bringing people into the market?"

Simple - Learn and do an objective Assessment.

Analyze the customer’s output devices - you know, the copiers, printers AND fax machines. See the volumes and real costs, not industry averages which are based on assumptions that no printer in the world will ever achieve. (Feel free to discuss offline or in another post - why industry averages are never accurate).

If you do the assessment right you will succeed and the additional 10 or 15 hours of time you may spend doing it will more than payoff. Plus - at the end of the day would you rather be assessing a prospective customer’s output fleet, or making net new cold calls? Consider instead making the cold calls to establish doing new assessments.

Add Reply

Post
×
×
×
×
Link copied to your clipboard.
×
×