What Did You Sell This Week?

Bill Bishop, vice president and partner with DataSource, ink in Chicago shares his company’s most notable sale of the week.   

What was your most notable sale this past week?

Bishop:  Supplying toner and service to a client’s 180 locations across the country. We’re providing that service in a multi-tiered capacity. At the first level we are offering an eco service where we have a fleet of machines residing in their warehouse. The lay of the land in these stores is each has a POS and an all-in-one, but they’re not at the point where they’re replacing hardware. What we’ve done is bought a stock of swap devices and when a machine goes down we send them a fully functional device. The best part is across all locations it’s the same unit so there’s total uniformity. They can take the toner and drum from the old machine and put it in the new machine, then send the defective unit back to us and we have one of our technicians bring it back up to speed and then it goes to the back of the line with the swap devices. We are facilitating overnight reconciliation of problems which also gives us the ability to keep an eye on all of the equipment nationally because as it is sent back to us we’re keeping track of it with tag numbers and basically doing a fleet inspection by virtue of every machine that’s rotating through our warehouse at one point or another.

Tier two is where we have a national service platform for onsite calls so we can troubleshoot  a machine over the phone, and if necessary send out a technician in an emergency capacity.

What type of account?

Bishop: A diamond retail chain with 180 locations nationwide.

Why did they choose you?

Bishop: Our ability to tailor the service to the businesses needs. There aren’t many companies on our side of the industry with the ability to understand the needs of the customer and develop something that’s totally custom made based on the customer’s needs.

This customer had a few challenges when we brought them on. They didn’t have the capital to lay out thousands of dollars to buy 180 units to refresh the fleet. At the same time, the order processing of toner and drums at the offsite locations was an absolute nightmare because none of their managers really knew want kind of toner and drums they needed to purchase. Internally they had an order form that was reflective of every product they ever used and was not specific to the current equipment. Plus the vendor that was supplying them with toner would not take back purchases that were ordered by mistake. There was a huge amount of money wasted on people who were not paying attention and no ability to reconcile. And worse yet, the quality of the product they were being sold was garbage and one out of three toners was blowing up and not functioning properly and there was no recourse for credit or defective replacement.

We came in not only to tailor a service package that would eliminate the need for hardware purchasing but also provide a backup if turnaround time of shipping the backup was too lengthy. And we also developed a strategy for toner and drums that not only organized everything internally, but in the case that something was ordered improperly we had the ability to refocus that out to the rest of our customer base which saved them some money and didn’t leave them with toner they’ll never use. We also offer a no questions asked return policy with our purchases. In the event they get a product that’s been compromised we send a replacement overnight at no charge. At every level we were able to develop a solution that corrected the problems and provided the opportunity for growth into the future that any one they had talked to hardware specific or not was unable to meet.  

How long did this sale take to close?

Bishop:  About 4 ½ to 5 months. The biggest challenge we had in the sales cycle was the timing of the consultation and in the diamond business there’s various holidays that influence their volume. Our ability to go out and take a snapshot across all 180 locations was a tedious process. Before we could present a formalized package I had to do the due diligence of understanding all the pricing, all the service needs, how I was able to get supplies and equipment to locations off the map, how I was going to get technicians to what were very minor marketplaces. It was an administrative situation more than a closing one. At the end of the day we saved them money and the stress we took off their shoulders.It was a no brainer for them.