This week Al Aaron, president of Saxon Office Technology in Morrisville, PA, shares what’s hot and what’s not in his marketplace.
What’s hot?
Aaron: Our color boxes are moving nice because people are buying color whether they need it or not. They figure the price is so close, why not? And our A4 products are moving well.
What’s not?
Aaron: You can talk all you want about apps [solutions], but less than 20 percent of [our] clients need apps. Now it’s beautiful you know it, you understand it, and you talk it, and the large deals are going to have some kind of app running in the background, no argument about that. But those are typically when you’re dealing with those 200-, 300, 1,500-machine deals going across a large campus or something like that.
You usually don’t see the small to midsize dealers knocking them down. It’s the large dealers and the direct manufacturers because even if you have the app and understand the app, the price gets too competitive. It gets to the point do you want to put out 100 machines and make $15,000? Is that what I want in my life? No. It’s not worth the reward. The reality is apps are nice. Yesterday I worked with two clients with apps. People say you can’t have box mentality, well guess how they pay me? The manufacturers don’t pay me on whether I sold an app or not, they pay me on how many boxes I moved last night. The truth of the matter is we’re still box people.
