These are the drawn fashionable steps that I recommend you take in assortment to ensure you receive the incomparable "deal" from your office equipment (counterfeit, print and fax) dealer. I am defining "deal" as the incomparable value considering pay, equipment capabilities and relevance support. I will archive each step below and provide some background writing for the importance of each step.
Step 1
To start your research, hatch a ballot of multiple vendors you appetite to evaluate. accomplish unfailing you build at least six vendors. You will requirement to ultimately compare at least four vendors' offers and a couple will drop out or be dropped by you through the process being described.
Research and carry grades and/or vendors in adjoining to your usual character or vendor preference. The industry and manufacturers are constantly changing. Unless you have researched the shop latterly, your fashionable perception of the industry and who father! s the chief equipment may not be accurate.
Step 2
Review and summarize your business requirements in print based on your modern patience and/or assistance agreement. Clearly understand what your requirements are before you meet with any vendors.
Step 3
Meet with your prepatent vendors and ask for feature set advice. Ask them "what's new"? The vendor's salespeople are well trained on the latest feature sets of equipment and their intended benefits for the user. Ask what features are new and how they might assist your occupation. Look for features that can provide real productivity boosts within your daily grind flow.
Discuss your servicing requirements with the vendors to shape incontrovertible they will be able to comply with your requirements. If not, drop that vendor from your timetable and add another one. Always keep at least six viable vendor choices through that portion of the evaluation process. Share your intention of requesting! quotes from multiple vendors, but not the names of the vendor! s being considered. Provide the vendors with a timeline of the decision-making steps you denote to follow.
Step 4
After meeting with vendors for your initial appointment, rear a summary poll of the equipment features that you require. For any new features you appetite to comprehend, outline a occupation case using a spreadsheet to account the feature's cost, the expected salt mines flow improvements forth with the resulting hard dollar cost reductions. Compare your rampant toil flow and associated costs to provide a benchmark for your pursuit case.
Step 5
construct a action for proposal (RFP) using your meeting notes. conceive an organized application for equipment and account support pricing that includes a statistics of the right equipment, described by performance criteria (speed and duty cycle), as well as feature set. Estimate what you necessity to spend up-front based on the RFP requirements, but do not share your budget with the vendors. Your acc! epted costs can provide an estimate for your budget.
Step 6
Distribute the RFP to the menu of lurking vendors that you have met with. You ardor to collect at least four quotes. that almost always misss sending the RFP to more than four imaginable vendors. Above, I recommended meeting with and distributing your RFP to six vendors. You require multiple quotes to complete a thorough evaluation of the rife shop. State a clear RFP submission scheme and do not accept RFP responses ago that day.
Step 7
Review the RFP responses submitted by your vendor pool. The number one news is that you will receive several quotes to compare; the bad news is that you won't be informed if you are getting the paramount deal viable. The hard carbon, print and fax industry is very restrictive regarding the word that flows outside of it. Cost and advantage support benchmarks are not available to industry outsiders. The only way to cognize that you are receiving the pr! ime value the industry has to proposition is to have insider c! ost and support benchmarks or use a guide/consultant that has those benchmarks.
Step 8
Now that you have at least four RFP responses to compare, how do you determine who delivers the leading value for you? toll is one differentiator and is the easiest to compare. sire steady you are comparing equal feature sets, duty cycle and quantities.
Qualitative dispensation metrics is another differentiator. You must decide which vendor delivers the terrific maintenance support for your organization and how anticipated it is that the vendor will perform as promised up-front.
References don't bullwork.
Vendors always have at least three customers (the typical quantity of references asked for) that are currently solicitationsed with them. You will only receive references that the vendors have already confirmed are petitionsed. As a end, you will talk to only the customers that are entreatysed with your entire vendor pool. If you hunger to audit references, fin! d them from your own contact arrangement of peers or well-wishers animate at other companies.
Keep in mind that salespeople in the copier industry are only compensated on equipment sales. that means they must stay to prospect and close new specialty to get paid. Finding prospective customers and closing equipment sales consumes ultimate of their while. No matter how attentive your sales representative is at that stage, you be deficient to look for additional support positions within the conceivable vendor to assist you when you loss remedy. In other words, pretend your sales representative leaves the vendor, who else or what existing position within that vendor can you conjecture to receive assistance from?
Step 9
When you do preferred your vendor of choice, notify all the other vendors not chosen by e-parcel or communication. proposition to detail up to 30 minutes with each vendor on a schedule that you dictate, to debrief them regarding the componen! ts of their RFP response that was not satisfactory for your or! ganizati on.
chore with your chosen vendor to document the usefulness-support requirements that were discussed while your initial meeting. engender that a chip of your overall agreement with them.
Step 10
When placing your initial equipment codification, do not upgrade accustomed lease agreements (not currently expiring) early unless:
1) You are experiencing a severe reliability issue that is interfering with workflow and you have worn all viable remedies with your swinging applicability vendor and/or
2) You are within 3 months of your lease(s) expiring and have identified a verifiable and quantifiable productivity benefit that will outweigh the cost of rolling (adding) the last several payments owed on your common knowledge lease into the new lease. that is true even if the vendor for the new equipment is telling you they will "buy out" the topical lease. They may be handling the details, but you are paying the remaining payments.
Step 11
Faithfully completing each step listed above will provide you with an accurate map of the options currently available within the ditto, print and fax marketplace. that process will father it lots easier to posh the principal choice among your options.
Unfortunately, that process will not be able to report if your choices are the par! amount the industry can bid. Only insider cost and support be! nchmarks allow for that comparison. You will have, however, completed a more thorough evaluation of available options than 90% of the unyieldings we speak with.
David Cantliffe is the President and Founder of BottomLine upbeat LLC located in Louisville, Colorado. BottomLine profit is a performance-based, client advocacy consulting group that specializes in reducing hard dollar costs for replication, print and fax expenses while simultaneously enhancing vendor maintenance support levels.
David has previous 18 years patience as a sales representative within the copier industry combined with 5 years forbearance as a dealership principal. You can download free ebooks containing additional cost reduction ideas at http://www.bottomlineadv.com inside the resources tab, radiate an e-postal account with questions or contact David at 888.400.3600.
© Copyright - David Cantliffe. All Rights restraine! d Worldwide
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