Monthly Color Volume on MFP

It's always a great idea to ask why THEY think the machine is a good fit for them even though they print at a third of the recommended volume.  In my experience, usually the customer will buy a machine that's overkill because they're worried about print productivity or product reliability.

If its productivity: the best way I put it was that print speed won't make a noticeable difference in most of your everyday printing. Example:

• Machine A prints 50 letter ppm - printing all 3k pages at once would take about an hour to print.  But they don't print everything at the same time during the month.  Over the course of a month, that's an average of about 135 pages per business day which means the machine will be printing for  2.7 minutes over the 8 hour day (2.7/480 minutes = .0056% of a day).  Then consider those 135 pages aren't printed all at once either.  Maybe each job is roughly 5-20 pages.  A 5 page document will take 6 seconds, a 10 page job will take 12 secs, 20 page job 24 secs.
• Machine B prints 30 letter ppm - printing all 3k will take about 1 hour 40 minutes per month. Averaging 135 pages per day, that's 4.5 minutes or .0094% of a business day.  A 5 page job will take 10 seconds, 10 page job will be 20 seconds, and a 20 page job will take 40 seconds.
• Comparing the two, customer can then decide whether or not its worth paying X dollars per month (or Y dollars over the lease term) to save them 40 minutes per month, 1.8 minutes per day, 4 seconds per 5 page job, etc.
• Then I throw this in: "By the way, a) how long does it take the users printing these jobs to walk to the MFP b) how often do you see printed jobs waiting for the user to pick up? c) how often do you see users waiting for the print job to finish?" Plant the idea that every minute print jobs sit idle in the machine is money wasted investing in Machine A.

If its reliability, then I'll do the above exercise comparing consumable life of drums/fuser/etc., especially if it's a 3 year term where at 3k per month it's likely that the drums, fuser, and developer won't need replacement in either machine anyway.

Lastly, some customers have the idea that a more robust machine ALWAYS means better reliability, but if you propose a machine which has a recommended AMPV 5-10k per month vs the 10-50k AMPV machine into a 3k volume environment, then you can make a point that you're still overselling them - it's just LESS overselling than before which I would consider a BETTER value to the customer.

wow love the details!  Love the last paragraph also

I have 5200's that do that few pages and they really do not have problems. I see where a marketing departments will insist they need the production machine with a Fiery and will print next to nothing. Back when all we had was the 6501's I would push back against that but with the 5100/5200 they run great so if they want to spend the money let them.

I remember places where they got sold the small machine they needed and kept complaining until we took it back and sold them the production machine. 

@msaeger ty for this, what type of volume per month on those?

I have had 5100's at the end of the lease with less 150k on them that have never made it to the pm. I also see some of ups stores that print next to nothing but they are required to have a production machine or something with a Fiery I believe?  I just looked at the history for one of those and they have had the 5200 for 12 months and have 40k so that's only 3300 a month.