What is an MFP Copier Solution Worth?

I've been busy for the past week visiting my son at Fort Benning, Ga.  He's graduated boot camp and will be there for another month for advanced training.  I'm proud of his accomplishment and can't wait to see him for his final graduation in July.

Anyway one of the Print4Pay Hotel sponsor is a Stethos, if you're not familiar with Stethos they are a software company that offers different solutions to enhance and modify the printer data stream without interfering with existing processes. The pricing for these solutions is off the the charts, believe me you can sell a solution and make an excellent profit!

So last week I made a phone call to a Net New Account, this was my third call to this Health Care account and I was able to get through to the IT manager. I have to admit I had a little bit of help, meaning my wife had to make a few visits to this Health Care Group (she's fine). Like most medical plans we had to pay something, about three weeks ago we received billing from them and the billing was at 3 pages that were printed from some sort of laser device, however they were not stapled. Thus I assumed (and I was right), that someone had to fold each piece of paper that was printed and then stuffed in the envelope.  The folding part is mundane and is a real loss of time when it comes to productivity. 

The plan was to speak about the billing I received and then to ask questions:

• Was this printed on a laser printer or copier? (laser)
• What is the percentage of billings that are more than one page (75%)
• How many billings are you sending out per month (1,800 more or less)
• Do you really have someone that is hand folding every bill that prints (yes)

With that I asked the IT person if they were aware of a print solution that would manage the print stream and tell the laser printer to staple, the IT person stated he was not and sounded intrigued and asked about pricing.  Fast forward to this week and we've asked for a print file to be emailed to us and we'll be performing a webex demo this week.

But that's not all!  In my initial conversation with the IT Managed I also uncovered that they have 15 Sharp MFP's in various offices, all are leased. I then asked it must be tough to manage all of those devices with the address book, meaning setting up new folders, new email addresses and new fax numbers (yes, health care still faxes a lot). The IT manager stated "I'm not sure what you mean by that", I then stated that with our devices you could make one change to the address book and then it would populate and change all of the systems across the network, can't you do this with the Sharp.  The answer was no and he wanted me to send additional information on the solution that we offered.

End result is that a simple low cost sub set staple solution opened the door for the possibility of taking down a 15 machine account.  I did have to jerk around with Planet Press and the high cost. I quoted a reasonable cost of $1,500 for the solution without Professional Services. I probably could have quoted $2,500 and it would have been a winner.

The moral of the story, learn about all of the solutions that are available, check your mail, you could have valuable leads just waiting for you to call them.  My wife always asks why I smell the mail (yup, I'm a sniffer of the mail), I told her that I can tell whether it was printed via laser, press or ink jet, my wife then told me how weird I was.

-=Good Selling=-