All it took was a little flower power for Tim Seeley of Seeley Office Systems in Glens Falls, New York, to see the green light.
After Tim became involved with a girl with a hippie sensibility his realized the family owned dealership could take that ‘green’ message to market and truly make a difference while gaining customers at the same time.
Based on what he’s seen across the industry, many dealers do a nice job of talking ‘green’ and offer toner recycling, but few are truly ‘green’ themselves. That’s why the Seeley approach is different. “It’s kind of like don’t talk about, be about it,” says Tim.
Another obstacle to making a ‘green’ pitch when it comes to toner recycling is that there’s still some uncertainty when it comes to determining if those collecting the cartridges are legitimately recycling people’s toners. “A lot of these private companies can do whatever they want, the customer doesn’t actually know,” contends Tim.
He admits recycling toner cartridges is a lot of work, especially now that Seeley has added five large accounts. “Every week we have about 100 toners out back that we have to box and ship out,” reports Tim.
Although it’s not a unique approach by any stretch, he recommends that dealers looking to leverage ‘green’ in their customer base, do it internally first. “Be as ‘green’ as you can be,” he suggests. “There’s some real nice karma that comes out of that and all of a sudden you’re living that and your message to the customer is focused on it.”
Once Seeley made it happen internally, they could better talk the talk because they were now walking the walk.
The goal for Seeley is to use local vendors as their first choice for recycling the toner cartridges whenever possible. Focusing on ‘green’ has opened the door to Seeley whereas if they were knocking on the door and trying to sell hardware they’d have been met with more resistance.
They’ve also discovered that they don’t necessarily need to start by talking to purchasing or a CFO, there’s other contacts within some organizations that are often more receptive to this ‘green’ message. Indeed, although it may have been an uphill battle selling their managed print program with the toner recycling via the traditional route, presenting it to an organization’s ‘green’ team or a member of the ‘green’ team has been much more beneficial.
“Purchasing would say, ‘Yeah we could do it and save money,’ and then IT would say, ‘It’s not worth it, [recycling/MPS programs] don’t work,’” recalls Tim. “When you’re coming at it with the ‘green’ team and they usually have senior VPs on it, they’re dying to find projects where they can poke themselves and say, ‘Look we’re green.’ Now you’re coming at it from a completely different angle.”
This approach is expanding Seeley’s contact list within these organizations, many of whom are not in positions that one would think of as a traditional contact for an office technology dealer. For example, at one client he deals with the senior director of support services.
“He’s basically in charge of all the food; how does he have anything to do with decisions on toners?” asks Tim. “Well, he’s the head of the ‘green’ team. They can be the most obscure position, but because they’re on this committee and they’ve been given the power to do things that are ‘green’, it changes the way we go about forming relationships.”
Seeley’s ‘green’ message continues to focus on the toner cartridges and how and how they enable organizations to do business locally and save money. “There’s not too many products out there that legitimately save money,” opines Tim.
Seeley has saved one client $30,000 a year via their toner recycling program.
“Another fascinating thing about green is that the larger companies are not incentivized to go ‘green’ at all. Even though they say they are, they’re not,” adds Tim. “If you’re with Staples, WB Mason, or OfficeMax, any of these big giants, they have so many arrangements with HP and Brother that they’re not incentivized to sell green.”
He adds that everyone is chasing these savings but that’s not necessarily true with these larger competitors in the toner space. “They’re telling people ‘Don’t mess with that stuff, it doesn’t work,’ but they’re getting big kickbacks from these OEM suppliers. There’s just so much opportunity for a local supplier and it makes sense. A lot of the companies we’ve picked up, they’re current supplier, not only were they not featuring it, the manufacturer prices were outrageously high because they’re not trying to sell it.”
The Seeley Office Systems approach is allowing them to maintain a healthy profit margin while being green. Tim feels that this is an approach more dealers should consider.
“Green is awesome. We’re all looking for these new revenue opportunities and it just kind of shows you when you’re focused on doing the right thing for yourself and the environment these opportunities arise.”
