It’s been a few days since I’ve had the desire to write. I’d bet the ranch that if I was paid to write, well, let’s say it would be like a actor having stage fright. Ah ha! That’s it, I’ve had writers block.
The last few days, I’ve had no ideas, no thoughts, until today. Today, I found myself trying to reel in a deal that I almost had to shore, it was only then that I found out that the fight was on from a competitor.
What happens when you can’t or don’t want to budge on price, we’re taught to fall back to our value points. Reemphasize those values points, why we’re better right? Thus what happens when that doesn’t work?
Today, I found myself doing an old fashioned side-side comparison for XYZ copier (leaving it as XYZ because my competition may be reading this and I don’t want to key them know what I’m up to.) I’ve written about the side by side comparisons before and a great place to get these are from Buyers Lab.
I was reading the BLI report spec report on the XYZ system, checking out the brochure of the XYZ system, checking my brochure, and then back to BLI again for additional specs on my own system.
I took a few minutes to recall the past few meetings with the prospect and was trying to remember what was important to them. Besides the feeds and speeds, besides price, what was one of their top concerns when looking at a new vendor?
I recalled some of the conversion about maintenance, and down time and how important that was to them. This particular customer can’t afford to have their system down a few times a month due to their tenacious appetite for paper. The prospect understand breakdowns, however, they will not tolerate a service engineer that comes out, diagnoses the fault, then states that they don’t have the part and needs to make a return call. We know the drill right?
All of the above brought back memories from my old analog side by side comparisons. Years ago it was more about FAB (feature-advantage-benefit). If no luck with FAB, you would then look to the consumables, in particular how long those consumables would last before a service engineer had to be on site.
In the scenario I was working on today, it dawned on me that the drums in the XYZ system had to be replaced. In fact those drums had to be replaced every 300K compared to every 900K in my system. Digging deeper I found that the same was true with the waste toner container, theirs 30K, mine every 125K. Replacement of toners also had me ahead for every two of theirs; we only needed one.
My road to earning the sale will be to educate the prospect that even with zero breakdowns, my competitors system will be down at the very minimum three times as much as my Ricoh.
I’ll you all know how this works out and remember to do those side by sides and you can get all of the neat information that I used from BLI.
Good selling!
