What Can Third Party Solution Provers do to Increase Business?

With my 27 years of experience in "down the street" sales, I for one can say that one of these old rules are true "Out of Site, is Out of Mind"! Lets take a look at the average reps day. Arrive in the AM, get settled in, from there you are either going on appointments or trying to get appointments whether from phone calls or cold calls. When we're not doing that we are up to our ears in paper work, or taking questions from customers in reference supplies, machine ops, billing, preparing quotes, and trying to close deals. Oops , I left one out, we also have to research speeds, feeds, pricing and solutions.

Recently, I was at a manufacturers one day training session for the Ricoh W2400 and Ricoh w3600 where they introduced the new system where we were informed about all of the new features. At most of these training sessions you may or may not have a rep from a third party solution provider show his wares and tout thier solution. This solution provider is an industry leader cost tracking and recovery technology for service professionals and their providers. We watched the slide show make some notes, asked some questions and to tell you the truth, most of us forgot 90% of what we heard. The meeting was then over and the "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" fell into place.

So, what went wrong? Was the rep boring, not knowledgeable? No, most of these reps do a fine job, its that the third party providers do not take into account is that we as reps have a full plate everyday.

The third party solutions providers like Print Audit, Captiva, Kofax, Doculex, Fabsoft, Ecopy, Zetafax and many others need to have a daily or weekly presence for the rep. It's impossible to call all of the reps, and since 20% of the reps do 80% of the business this would be a terrible waste of time. So, how about print advertising, not a bad idea however most reps do not get to see the dealer magazines, plus they are read today and gone tomorrow. Again, how can these companies maintain a daily or weekly presence? For me the answer is simple, go to where the reps are, and where are most reps, well the 20% of the best reps are researching and gaining knowledge through the Internet.

The best reps are doing research before 9:00am and after 5:00pm, whether working from the office or working at home. Ours is not a 9-5 job and we know it!

Advertising on the P4PHotel http://www.p4photel.com/ is a great way to stay in front of 1,500 reps every hour of the day and week. Brand awareness is key along with having the reps see your solution every day. The P4P Hotel averages 100,000 hits per month and has an average of 100 reps a day visiting the site. Take it from someone who knows if I see your ad on a daily basis, you'll be getting a call from me sometime in the near future.