They will employ new and innovative finance models:<\/strong> Traditional Copier leases with CPP minimums built in won\u2019t be enough. In the world of XaaS, new and innovative finance vehicles will need to arise to facilitate SBB and other \u201cstack\u201d models. I\u2019m going to make a shameless plug here for GreatAmerica Financial Services because they\u2019ve already taken the plunge. If you want to be wildly successful you should probably have a chat with them because they get it and have moved way past just talking points.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nI\u2019m sure that many who read this blog won\u2019t agree with me, and that\u2019s okay.\u00a0Just like the early days of managed print, some of what I\u2019ve written is pretty strong medicine. The difference between now and then is that as an office equipment dealer you only have a few choices ahead of you: \u00a0Survive, sell, or become wildly successful. So what\u2019s it going to be?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I started my career in the office equipment industry, dealers were having a tough go of it.\u00a0Cartridge and toner margins were way down due to an influx of inexpensive compatible and remanufactured options and an ocean of people trying to take a piece of the pie.\u00a0 Business owners were pulling their hair out trying to compete against low-cost options and new basement-grade competitors. Toner cartridges were a commodity and they were sold as such. The customer picked up the phone (or answered the phone from a savvy sales rep), ordered the toner they needed, and the process repeated. It wasn\u2019t a very sophisticated buying or selling process, and the customer held all the cards. The good news at that time was that print volumes per user were still growing; growing big time. Times were kind of tough. The way we offered office print and copy had to change if our businesses were to remain healthy. It changed alright, it changed a lot. No single vendor or software provider or dealer can take credit for this change, though some will try.\u00a0No, the great change was from a thousand threads of smaller changes that came together at the right time and the right place. A new model for print was born and it was called \u201cManaged Print\u201d.\u00a0It brought margins back and swept smaller price-based competitors into the gutters. I\u2019ve been lucky enough to work with hundreds of top-players over my career to date. Let\u2019s have a look at what they did to succeed. I\u2019ll break down the things that made them successful, and in some cases, wildly successful: Successful: Here are the top characteristics of successful office equipment dealers I\u2019ve witnessed to date: Powerful Sales Engines: The old days of \u201cInside Sales\u201d reps taking toner orders became pass\u00e9.\u00a0 Those that developed powerful outside sales organizations knew that it was a land grab and being first mattered.\u00a0 As Managed Print was new, there was a lot of land to grab.\u00a0 An army of strong sales professionals grabbed it. They stopped selling cartridges:\u00a0\u201cCPP\u201d (Cost Per Page) \u201cCPS\u201d (Cost Per Click) and \u201cCPI\u201d (Cost Per Impression) became the buzz terms of the day.\u00a0 The billing acronym didn\u2019t matter.\u00a0What mattered, no matter what you called it, was that every customer buying toner did so under a term agreement, a contract, lasting three to five years. Service excellence: One thing I\u2019ve always believed is that the type of hardware never mattered.\u00a0 All that mattered was that the customer felt it was the best equipment because it worked more often than not.\u00a0 Successful office equipment dealers built large service organizations to ensure the customer experience was seamless. They nailed auto-toner replenishment: The easiest way to make sure customers weren\u2019t calling around for toner was to make sure they never had to worry about ordering it.\u00a0Also, you didn\u2019t want to warehouse toner. To be successful, dealers worked with a distributor who could drop ship your stuff for them, custom labels and all. They made money with money: \u00a0An expression I love is \u201cIf you ain\u2019t leasing you ain\u2019t living.\u201d I heard it from a sales rep nearly a decade ago.\u00a0Getting the equipment under a lease and tying in the CPC contract was a huge success factor for successful dealers. Wildly Successful: If we\u2019re honest, it was pretty easy to be successful for a lot of years as long as you knew how to run a business. To be wildly successful, however, required a lot more. In addition to the success factors listed in the first set of bullet points, to be wildly successful dealers had to do the following: They sold using Assessments: The dealers who were wildly successful understood that good managed print assessments could increase win rates from 30% to a staggering 70% or higher.\u00a0Why? Because a good assessment got the customer to build their own solution based on good intelligence.\u00a0You didn\u2019t just replace a copier with a spec for spec alternative.\u00a0 Was it being utilized correctly? Did you have the right size device for the volume being produced? What were the average job sizes, and did they warrant consolidating devices or distributing the infrastructure? Using software tools and walkthroughs, wildly successful dealers let the customer sell themselves on the final solution.\u00a0Sales reps, especially good ones, cost a lot of money, so a seven out of 10 close rate allowed for some incredibly fat margins. They helped customers to spend less: \u00a0Like it or not, one of the main benefits of managed print was helping customers save money so they could use it for other stuff like information technology (IT) assets and other areas strapped for cash.\u00a0Wildly successful dealers understood this and employed powerful rules for recovery and cost reduction. They consolidated infrastructure and found ways to get rid of waste. They were ravenous savings hunters, taking over competitive accounts by proving they could be much more effective at putting dollars back into their customers\u2019 bank accounts. They took everything over: \u00a0Sharing was not an option. Wildly successful dealers made sure they knocked their competitors out of all of their accounts. \u201cOne throat to choke\u201d became a battle cry and they convinced customers that the right partner could do it all.\u00a0Every printer, every fax, every copier, every MFD, every scanner, EVERYTHING. Being Wildly Successful Tomorrow: The key attributes of successful and wildly successful office equipment dealers no longer matter for those looking to be wildly successful. Yup, I said it. Everything that got us to where we are is now the expected norm and offers no opportunity for consistent and dramatic growth.\u00a0 Why? Because print volumes per user are shrinking, and fast. They will grow through acquisition: \u00a0Organic growth was okay for those looking to be successful in the past but for those looking to be wildly successful, buying other dealers and building a national presence will be key. To be wildly successful without buying other successful companies, well, frankly, it\u2019s impossible.\u00a0Page volumes aren\u2019t growing anymore and we\u2019ve hit a saturation point for converting non-managed print […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":30546,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1650,82,87,1638],"tags":[3471],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30545"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30545"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30548,"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30545\/revisions\/30548"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/Wildly-successful-145x145.png\")
When I started my career in the office equipment industry, dealers were having a tough go of it.\u00a0Cartridge and toner margins were way down due to an influx of inexpensive compatible and remanufactured options and an ocean of people trying to take a piece of the pie.\u00a0 Business owners were pulling their hair out trying to compete against low-cost options and new basement-grade competitors. Toner cartridges were a commodity and they were sold as such. The customer picked up the phone (or answered the phone from a savvy sales rep), ordered the toner they needed, and the process repeated. It wasn\u2019t a very sophisticated buying or selling process, and the customer held all the cards. The good news at that time was that print volumes per user were still growing; growing big time.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.enxmag.com\/twii\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/ladder-300x200.jpg\")
The key attributes of successful and wildly successful office equipment dealers no longer matter for those looking to be wildly successful. Yup, I said it. Everything that got us to where we are is now the expected norm and offers no opportunity for consistent and dramatic growth.\u00a0 Why? Because print volumes per user are shrinking, and fast.<\/p>\n