A dealer cannot survive by boxes alone; there’s a hell of a lot more to be found in the full catalog, and incentivizing behavior need not end with a meaty spiff. Cross-selling is the key to ensuring that MFP clients are well aware of your solutions, and vice versa.
Let’s be honest, if account representatives could sell MFPs all the live-long day, VP and salesperson alike would be quite content. But that’s not the world we live in (see decreasing print volumes). Dealers are highly invested in managed services, software and side road offerings like security cameras, EV chargers and UCaaS. More and more of the top performers are making substantial headway in grooming and conditioning their reps to be better cross-sellers.
In this week’s State of the Industry report on sales, we asked our dealer panel to assess its cross-selling propensity. It’s not quite fully adopted across the industry. Some are thriving while others still have a ways to go. Not to parade out a tired and worn adage, but if your reps aren’t cross-selling accounts, someone else will.
Leading with the box in a sales conversation is obviously not a bad thing, and many dealers resist the temptation to discourage the practice. LDI Connect of Jericho, New York, falls into that category. But the approach the dealer takes is to augment those efforts by providing additional resources and subject matter experts, notes Jay Feldman, senior vice president, client management and strategy.
“By doing this, we can take that burden off the print-heavy rep and give us the opportunity to leverage those relationships we’ve already developed by having a subject matter expert—who can be just as trusted as the primary account manager—and leverage those skill sets so they can go deeper and wider in those accounts,” Feldman noted. “We have reps that are driven by the other disciplines, because they all know that their compensation, their bonus opportunity, is all driven by the ability to be more diverse in their portfolio. They’re selling seats, so to speak. And if they hit a seat target for a given month or quarter, they will achieve a higher percentage of payout on their gross profit bonus.”
Room to Improve
If he had to grade the cross-selling performance of Applied Business Concepts, Vice President of Sales Scott Bonck would peg it as a B performance, with room for improvement. It’ll be a key for the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, dealer to better compete with manufacturer direct branches.
“Our sales quotas do a good job of promoting a blend of products and services,” he said. “We also have qualifiers to capitalize on cross-selling, but we could do a better job. As always, compensation draws behaviors. I tell our sales professionals, we must differentiate ourselves or die. We’ve got to be different from the rest.”
It helps when your company has a hashtag philosophy of #BeyondtheBox, and that is certainly the case with EDGE Business Systems of suburban Atlanta. The cross-sell is an essential ingredient key to the dealer’s success, notes Josh Salkin, one of the company’s four partners.
“We’re proud to provide the best product offering from our hardware partners Xerox, Canon and Lexmark but really try to enhance our conversations with document-specific applications,” he said. “Combine that with our award-winning service and we have a powerful solution.”
Sales Catalysts
It only takes a taste of success in the other disciplines within the office realm to add heft behind a cross-selling initiative. For Levifi of Charleston, South Carolina, that entails production print and third-party finishing solutions. The dealer has also been focusing its managed IT base in a swath that covers Columbia and Charleston. According to Lance Redler, the company’s CRO, the IT proposition is a far cry from what reps are used to pushing.
“Getting old-school, 30-year sales reps—the ones who can sell copiers with their eyes closed and hands tied behind their back—to start talking about managing desktops, helpdesks or networks and Microsoft 365, that’s a challenge,” he said. “But the reps who are picking it up are doing very well. We do attach accelerator bonuses to quotas on managed IT. We don’t pay a bonus if they hit their other numbers. It’s an additional incentive to reach higher.”
Some dealers remain motivated by the economics behind MFPs. Stone’s Office Equipment of Richmond, Virginia, falls into that category, and the logic more than backs up the approach.
“Our reps are still heavy on copiers and printers because the recurring revenue stream drives our industry’s business,” notes Sam Stone, company president.
