Former Office Equipment Vendor Reveals 11 Secrets To Get The primo Deal From Your Vendor!

These are the express steps that I recommend you take in neatness to ensure you receive the nonpareil "deal" from your office equipment (hard print, print and fax) dealer. I am defining "deal" as the primo value considering appraisal, equipment capabilities and office support. I will series each step below and provide some background description for the importance of each step.

Step 1

To start your research, procreate a timetable of multiple vendors you hunger to evaluate. assemble uncompromising you admit at least six vendors. You will craving 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 cover characters and/or vendors in annexation to your usual variety or vendor preference. The industry and manufacturers are constantly changing. Unless you have researched the exchange of late, your common knowledge perception of the industry and who fabricat! es the bad equipment may not be accurate.

Step 2

Review and summarize your business requirements in print based on your present-day pipeline and/or ministration agreement. Clearly understand what your requirements are before you meet with any vendors.

Step 3

Meet with your quiescent 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 nourishment your trade. Look for features that can provide real productivity boosts within your push flow.

Discuss your labor requirements with the vendors to invent changeless they will be able to comply with your requirements. If not, drop that vendor from your memorandum 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 f! rom multiple vendors, but not the names of the vendors being c! onsidere d. Provide the vendors with a timeline of the decision-making steps you connote to follow.

Step 4

After meeting with vendors for your initial appointment, spawn a summary row of the equipment features that you require. For any new features you necessity to introduce, outline a trade case using a spreadsheet to archive the feature's cost, the expected trial flow improvements forward with the resulting hard dollar cost reductions. Compare your mod slogging flow and associated costs to provide a benchmark for your biz case.

Step 5

hatch a requisition for proposal (RFP) using your meeting notes. author an organized demand for equipment and ministration support pricing that includes a screed of the wished-for equipment, described by performance criteria (speed and duty cycle), as well as feature set. Estimate what you appetite to spend up-front based on the RFP requirements, but do not share your budget with the vendors. Your common costs can provide! an estimate for your budget.

Step 6

Distribute the RFP to the series of future vendors that you have met with. You hunger to collect at least four quotes. that almost always requirements sending the RFP to more than four imaginable vendors. Above, I recommended meeting with and distributing your RFP to six vendors. You be deficient multiple quotes to complete a thorough evaluation of the present grocerteria. State a clear RFP submission day and do not accept RFP responses extinct that juncture.

Step 7

Review the RFP responses submitted by your vendor pool. The satisfying news is that you will receive several quotes to compare; the bad news is that you won't be schooled if you are getting the paramount deal practicable. The reflection, print and fax industry is very restrictive regarding the ammo that flows outside of it. Cost and kindness support benchmarks are not available to industry outsiders. The only way to prize that you are receivin! g the superlative value the industry has to presentation is to! have in sider cost 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? estimate is one differentiator and is the easiest to compare. draw on convinced you are comparing equal feature sets, duty cycle and quantities.

Qualitative assistance metrics is another differentiator. You must decide which vendor delivers the terrific usefulness support for your organization and how given to it is that the vendor will perform as promised up-front.

References don't obligation.

Vendors always have at least three customers (the typical quantity of references asked for) that are currently beggingsed with them. You will only receive references that the vendors have already confirmed are petitionsed. As a development, you will talk to only the customers that are appealsed with your entire vendor pool. If you wish to t! est references, find them from your own contact arrangement of peers or confreres alive at other companies.

Keep in mind that salespeople in the copier industry are only compensated on equipment sales. that means they must extend to prospect and close new pursuit to get paid. Finding prospective customers and closing equipment sales consumes ultimate of their stretch. No matter how attentive your sales representative is at that stage, you drive for to look for additional support positions within the inherent vendor to assist you when you hurting for succor. In other words, pretend your sales representative leaves the vendor, who else or what existing position within that vendor can you presume to receive assistance from?

Step 9

When you do eclectic your vendor of choice, notify all the other vendors not chosen by e-postal overhaul or manuscription. presentation to deliver up to 30 minutes with each vendor on a schedule that you dictate, to debrief the! m regarding the components of their RFP response that was not ! satisfac tory for your organization.

pains with your chosen vendor to document the advantage-support requirements that were discussed pending your initial meeting. produce that a apportionment of your overall agreement with them.

Step 10

When placing your initial equipment form, do not upgrade modern lease agreements (not currently expiring) early unless:

1) You are experiencing a severe reliability issue that is interfering with workflow and you have drained all no sweat remedies with your in progress employ 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 in circulation lease into the new lease. that is true even if the vendor for the new equipment is telling you they will "buy out" the ongoing lease. They may be handling the details, but you are paying the remaining payments.!

Step 11

get ready indubitable you allow for the trick needed to complete a thorough analysis of your requirements (equipment and employment), the future vendor pool, as well as the proposed equipment and support options. For an 8-15 machine fleet, the instance bail will be approximately 70 labor hours. For equipment fleets larger than 15 units, the spell smart money will wax from 100 labor hours to multiple hundreds of labor hours depending on the count of units in your fleet. I am happy to provide you with a break out of labor hours needed by step. fair-minded whoop or let fly me an e-air letter using the lore listed below.

Faithfully completing each step listed above will provide you with an accurate map of the options currently available within the hard similarity, print and fax marketplace. that process will fashion it lots easier to boss the tough choice among your options.

Unfortunately, that process will not be able to explain if your ch! oices are the tops the industry can feeler. Only insider cost! and sup port benchmarks allow for that comparison. You will have, however, completed a more thorough evaluation of available options than 90% of the congealeds we speak with.

David Cantliffe is the President and Founder of BottomLine resources LLC located in Louisville, Colorado. BottomLine favor is a performance-based, client advocacy consulting group that specializes in reducing hard dollar costs for carbon, print and fax expenses while simultaneously enhancing vendor favor support levels.

David has accomplished 18 years forbearance as a sales representative within the copier industry combined with 5 years participation as a dealership principal. You can download free ezines containing additional cost reduction ideas at http://www.bottomlineadv.com inside the resources tab, hurl an e-postal business with questions or contact David at 888.400.3600.

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