This week Aric Manion, president of Kelley Imaging Systems in Seattle, Washington shares his dealership’s most notable sale of the week.
What was your most notable sale this week?
Manion: An IT project from a current customer who we have all of their MPS and all of their copiers. We sold them about an $8,000 project to do a server migration and then got about a $60,000 contract to manage all their desktops and servers for the next three years.
What type of customer?
Manion: An escrow company.
Why did the customer choose you?
Manion: Because of the relationship, we’ve done a good job for them. The thing we do through our assessments with Agiliant (Kelley Systems uses the Agiliant program for managed network services) is we’re not just coming in and saying you need this server and nine months later that doesn’t work for them. We try to understand their business is growing rapidly and how do we set them up for the next three years. They had other vendors in there and got other quotes on the server migration, but what we brought to the table was a business plan where strategic IT would be covered under this plan for the next three years. When we’re in the IT space we’re trying to do infrastructure that we can do like output devices across all platforms without trying to be an escrow specialist. A lot of the VARs offer business-specific lines of software. We’re want to be the infrastructure experts.
How long did this sale take to close and the sale?
Manion: We started talking to them in January, did the assessment in February and have been going back and forth on what’s the right solution for them going forward.
