You’ve demoed that shiny new copier for your print shop decision maker. Pricing is no longer the issue, maintenance pricing is fine, the copier operation was flawless and you don’t feel comfortable with using a drop close to secure the order. Yet, you can move the deal forward.
You have a suspicion that if you could just add a little more value to the deal, you might be able to close the order now. It makes you think, “What in the world can I add that would increase the value of my copier or services and won’t cost me anything?”
With at least a half-dozen print shop decision makers, I was able to close the order with this value add.
I offered to cold call once a week for one month at no cost. I stated that the print shop would supply their business cards, flyers and/or handouts. I asked for about 100 handouts and then dedicated one day a week for the next four weeks to cold call on behalf of the print shop.
I asked the owner to print a few hundred statement-size notepads with the name of his print shop, address and phone number. In addition, I asked the owner to buy a large bag of hard candies. The process was to put two pads together with a half-dozen candies and shrink wrap them together for the handout. This made for a neat package and I didn’t have one cold call that refused the handouts.
At the end of the day, I reported back to the decision maker, made copies of the business cards and reported on any hot prospects that I found. I left the original business cards with the owner and kept the copies for myself. Can you guess what I did with those copies?
I can remember finding one prospect who needed 5,000 color prints/copies. The printer I was cold calling for was elated when he was able to secure the order and, of course, those 5,000 color pages were printed on one of my color devices.
What’s the method to the madness here? Well, in addition to cold calling for the print shop, I was also scouting and prospecting for net new clients for copiers.
I didn’t mind doing the cold calls because I knew one of my weaknesses was cold calling. I have no problem doing it, but it always seems that I put it off for another day. I was able to kill two birds with one stone.
Thus, there were no wasted selling days on my part, since I was working two jobs at the same time. By the way, this is something you could use for almost any type of account, although probably not enterprise. However, this will work with most SMB accounts.
Be sure to check out Art’s website at www.p4photel.com and his blogs at www.p4photel.com/blog.
