Sunday, March 31, 2013

WTF is a Copier Lease Forgiveness?

This week I was handed a quote from one of your reps in the office.  The system that was quoted was a Sharp MX-264N and the proposal in my eyes was weak at best.  The proposal addressed speeds, feeds, pricing and of course those meaning full laundry list of features such as scan2email, scan2folder and network printing.  Don't all of the MFPs have these as standard features now, the point I'm trying to make that in this proposal there was nothing that made the dealership, or the system stand out from all of the other proposal. 

The most I got out of this quote was this "Network printing utilizing PCL print board for fast efficient printing",  WTF!!!

The best line of the quote however was this "Includes Lease forgiveness of current lease and shipping unit back to leasing Co".  Buyer Beware right!!

If you're an end user reading this blog, if you ever see the above line I beg you to through out the proposal and the sales person and here's why.  First, there is no such thing as a Lease Forgiveness and if there was you would only be able to get that from the leasing company that you leased the equipment from and not the Dealer or Direct Branch.  If you think that the remaining payments are going to
magically disappear then you're dead wrong.  The salesperson in this case is using wording to make you believe the remaining stream of payments will vanish in a puff of smoke and the cost they are quoting you for the new lease is just that.  With this proposal if the customer elected to move forward, the dealer would pay off the remaining stream of payments to the leasing company. 

If you're the salesperson presenting the proposal you can use statements like these:

"We XYZ dealership will pay off your remaining stream of payments (x amount) if you elect to upgrade to a new system", or "this proposal includes paying XYZ leasing company a sum of  x amount of payments to satisfy the remaining stream of payments". There's many different ways it can be worded, but you need to tell the prospect or customer how many payments are left, this way you don't encounter a problem down the road due to additional charges that the customer and you may not be aware of such as tax, late payments, missed payments, early return fees.

Now, I know the sales person who did the quote I'm writing about and I'm surprised that a guy with this many years of experience is running about crafting crappy proposals and teetering on the edge of not being forthcoming.

If it sounds to good to be true, it usually is.

-=Good Selling=-

3 comments:

Bali Resorts said...

Great Post, i love it

Anonymous said...

This saved my butt a few years ago. Proposal stated "paying 9 remaining payments of $4XX.XX" Customer came back 3 months later and stated there was actually 29 months remaining! They ended up taking us to court...they didn't win.

Johnny M said...

The proper way to do this is to have the customer ask the leasing company to provide a payout invoice. This can also be called a performa Invoice. This includes remaining number of months and any late charges. Do not ask for a buyout invoice unless customer wants to retain equipment. The buyout invoice is the remaining payments, late fees and residual which can be up to 30% of the original cost of the equipment.
Returning the equipment is another story..
Johnny Copier