Art Post
I’ve been busy 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 his final graduation in July.
Anyway, one of the Print4Pay Hotel’s sponsors is Stethos. If you’re not familiar with Stethos they are a software company that offers solutions to enhance and modify the printer data stream without interfering with existing processes. The pricing for these solutions is off the charts. Believe me you can sell a solution and make an excellent profit.
Last week I made a phone call to a net new account. This was my third call to this healthcare account and I was finally able to get through to the IT manager. I had a little bit of help, meaning my wife who had to make a few visits to this healthcare group (she’s fine). Like most medical plans we had to pay something. “About three weeks ago we received a bill which was three unstapled pages printed from some sort of laser device. Thus I assumed and was right that someone had to fold each piece of paper that was printed and then stuff it in the envelope. The folding part is mundane and is a 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 was not and sounded intrigued and asked about pricing. Fast forward to this week and we’ve asked for a print file to be e-mailed to us and will be performing a Webex demo.
But that’s not all. In my initial conversation with the IT manager I also uncovered that they have 15 Sharp MFPs in the various offices—all leased. I said it must be tough to manage all of those devices with the address book, meaning setting up new folders, new e-mail addresses, and new fax numbers (Yes, healthcare still faxes a lot.). The IT manager stated, “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”
I told him with our devices you could make one change to the address book and then it would populate and change all the systems across the network. You can’t do this with the Sharp. His response was no and he wanted me to send some addition information on the solution that we offered.
End result is that a simple low-cost subset 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 all about all of the solutions that are available. Check your mail. You could have valuable leads waiting for you to call them.
My wife always asks why I smell the mail (Yup, I’m a sniffer of the mail.). I say that I can tell whether it was printed via laser, press or inkjet. My wife tells then me how weird I am.
Good selling!
