I wanted to blog a little about what’s creating some excitement in the field for me in recent months for MFP’s and printers. Creating excitement for MFP’s and printers can be a daunting task at times. However, we listen to our prospects and customers first, ask many questions, and then find and feel their pain with their process.
Tops on my list of late has been:
Workflow: I’ve written about this before, it’s not until we start asking questions like, “understood, you need scanning, but what are you doing with those documents once they are scanned?” Some prospects and customers may only have the need to save those documents in a PDF while many others may need to distribute those documents, index, OCR, extract data, and maybe import to a document management system.
Cloud Services: I’m just touching the basics here with asking the prospect or the customer if they are currently using services like Dropbox, Evernote, MS 365, Google Drive, etc. But this line of questioning does pique many prospects’ interest and leads them to asking additional questions about these services.
Mobile Print: There are still many prospects and customers that aren’t aware that they can print to our devices from smart phones, and iPads. I’d rather be the salesperson who states our devices can rather than the salesperson who never even brings up mobile print.
Substrates: Personally, I call it media, but I’ve been corrected a few times that I need to stick to substrates. Are you asking “what types of media/substrate do you use in your current imaging system?” or “are there any print jobs that you are farming out to a print shop or CRD?” This line of questioning could lead to a higher end color device being placed. Matter of fact, I just received some test samples of label stock today and I can’t wait to test it and then start showing it on appointments.
Envelopes: Years ago it was a no no, now it’s a yes we can! Again, I’d rather be the sales person that states our imaging systems can do this rather than not mentioning it at all.
Scan to Any Folder: Well, for lack of a better term, I’m asking prospects and customers, “Wouldn’t you rather be able to search your “scan to” folders from the MFP, rather than scanning to a folder or an e-mail address and then going back to your desk to access the file, name the file and then move the file to your desired location?” Pretty powerful since most existing MFP prospects and customers can’t do this.
OCR: The creation of searchable PDFs is a great thing so go ahead and ask this question, “once you’ve scanned the document do you ever have the need to review that document?” And if so “are there certain phrases or numbers or words that you look for?” If so, “OK, so you’re scrolling with your mouse through every page of that document looking for that information, wouldn’t it be a time saver if you could just search on that word, phrase or number that you’re looking for?” Again, pretty powerful to the prospects and users that may have the need.
Blank Page Detection for Scanning: If you’re not mentioning it then your competition is; dig deep and find out what documents they’re scanning—even ask to see those documents.
One more item, get more involved with prospects and customers who still have a paper-intensive process.
Good selling!
