Let's say you're selling copiers - no big stretch there.
Your company/dealer/branch conducts Monday morning group meetings followed by individual, one on one, 'Sales funnel' sessions.
Consider the following:
Scenario 1 - New Sales Rep
Your company-owned, CRM has to be updated, all the stages of the cycles illustrated and filled.
Your funnel covers 150% of your quota - all target accounts diagrammed, bases covered, red flags seen. Number of appointments, number of cold calls, demos, etc. etc., etc.
All normal and ordinary. You're ready and prepared for that meeting with your Sales Manager.
Scenario 2 - Old-Salt
Same company, same meeting.
You've been moving copiers since 1980 and remember selling machines on real cold calls; face to face, demo in the lobby, one appointment close.
All your prospects' and clients' business cards are at your fingertips. You've worked with more sales managers than you can remember.
Your Monday morning routine includes reminding the Sales Manager why you're still there, how much gear you've landed over the past decade and how many more are coming down in the next 30 days. You present this verbally because you don't get paid to play with spreadsheets and computers.
It isn't that we are not familiar with tough business decisions. We all know somebody who has been a victim of such acts.
HP's announced decision to let die WebOS and TouchPad - a product that lived just 49 days - in and of itself is stupendous.
Spinning off their PCs may seem surprising unless you once sold IBM ThinkPads and remember selling IBM printers.
Go back to IBM, heck go back to the Mopier, the HP9065, and Edgeline; is it really a surprise that after investing a billion, shifting leadership, HP drops and adds?
There is more, much more here, and it is not all Dark.
Well, technically, I attended the 2011 Managed Print Summit, which to me, seemed even more out of place, until I looked at the scheduled presenters: Ed Crowley, Robert Newry, Mike Stramaglio, Jim Lyons and Greg VanDeWalker – all MpS regulars, each in the ecosystem from early on if not the very beginning.
And there were more. Jim D’Emidio, Ed McLaughlin, Mark Mathews and Jim Phillips – old-skool hardware and infrastructure dudes who each see the impact of MpS.
And the new guys? How about Brendan Peters from Intel, Tim Grimes from Research in Motion or Gordon Jones from Green Hills Software? Googlitize them if you don’t know who they are. For now, let’s just say wireless, intelligent devices and security software. Yeah, at an MpSummit, the day before the large toner cartridge show. Who woulda thunk?..."
Call it the "MacGyver Cloud"; duct tape, paperclips, hope, and a prayer - whatever it takes, string it together.
In this cloud, give away 6-month subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal, HBR, LeopardONE, MPSInsightsPro, LuLu, TMZ, on and on.
Bundle all of it in. Free.
Hook up with Verizon and get on their network, into their stores. Hell, buy Verizon.
Get every remaining print publisher on the phone, in a Halo room, or to the West Coast and offer up an advanced conduit to 1 million customers, through MacGyver. Negotiate for a percentage and target Amazon/Borders; the Nook and the Kindle.
Spark up the TouchPad plants. Rationalize, re-calibrate and reorganize PSG around generations of TouchPad. Get this new team out there selling MacGyver and giving away TouchPads through every channel. EVERY CHANNEL. Sell it at 99 bucks - through Walmart.
Call the second model, "TheNext" and release a Leopard print version.
Buy a f*cking advertising agency, not another technological oddity.
As time has gone on I have "worn multiple hats" in my tenure at Expert Laser Services. Graphic Artist, Managed Print Services Specialist and Social Media Marketing Engineer are all responsibilities I have held or currently hold.
As of recent I have also taken on a new role, one with as much prestige as any. In fact I am one of only a few professional "Printer Destruction Specialist" in the world. This is a humbling and rewarding career, one of which I know there are many aspirants...
In this post I would like to outline what makes a great printer destruction possible. Below you will find a most useful guide for the annihilation of print and copy devices that if practiced regularly, will ensure a most sublime level of expertise in the noble art and science of printer destruction.
A couple of weekends ago, I was fortunate enough to squeeze off a few rounds from a Sharps 1874 - you may remember the 1990 movie, "Quigley Down Under" with Tom Selleck.
The weapon had a prominent role.
At its peak, the Sharps was considered one of the best, long-range firearms in the world.
"...In 1874, after 700 Comanche warriors attacked 30 buffalo hunters in the Texas panhandle, the hunters used their Sharps rifles to exact a punishing toll. By the early 1880s, the long-range models had become the favorites of professional buffalo hunters because of their long-range capability..."
Indeed, even today, the long-gun is a fully functional, work of art: double triggers, lever action, 34" barrel, 15 pounds she delivers a good kick, our black powder loads were clustering in 8 inches, 300 yards - we aren't that good.
The Sharps is cool - but the movie/sales metaphor?
Rugged individualism in the face of despotic ownership and management; Analog Guy, in a digital world full of other analog guys who think they're digital.
I don't even know you, but you seem to know a great deal about me.
So Steve, thank you for my Droid X.
Thanks for forcing Microsoft to integrate a mouse, even if it was on DOS 4.0.
Thank you for getting IBM to utilize 'preemptive multi-threading in OS/2 even though it was a doomed OS.
Thanks for pushing the 3.5" floppy. Thanks for letting all the peripherals that attach to the Lisa automatically connect.
Thanks for AppleTalk.
Thank you for seeing I really only wanted three or four songs from an album.
Thank you for disrupting the music industry - giving us Lady Gaga and incredible, mind-blowing live shows. (figure it out)
Thanks for recognizing a dwindling need and not allowing the iPad to print.
You beat the PS/2 and helped IBM find a new way.
You destroyed the music industry and helped them find a new way, giving us immediate access to the music and artists we, the people, wanted to hear, at 99 cents a pop.
Sony, because of you, experienced the stink of defeat, the folly of internal business silo and they found a new way.
"Autonomy is the market leader in the provision of software that automates the analysis of unstructured data, whether in the form of text, audio, images or video." - UBS, July 2008
The other day, I sat in on a webinar. The fine folks at Lyra were presenting "Printing supplies market trends MPS" - yeah, I know, who the hell would sit in on one of these?
MpS Geeks, that's who.
Of course, the data presented has been fodder for DOTC for the past year; we will never get back the placement levels of 2008, A3 devices are dying(ahem), any recovery will be linked directly to the surviving dealership's ability to focus on workflow, not the box. We know this, correct?
Then a funny thing came up - OEMs are "rationalizing" their fleet offerings. They are narrowing down the number of models.
Oh boy, I am in the middle of the Anthony Robbins "Ultimate Edge...blah blah blah..." - it's good, really, I mean it and someday I want a place on Fiji right next door. So what better way than to study the dude.
He's humongous, you know.
Perhaps you don't know Anthony Robbins or what he does - in a nutshell, he helps point out the obvious to the oblivious. He sounds sincere, is the consummate selling professional - always closing - and makes an impression. He attracts - I guess that is one reason he has 'handlers' - huh. Well, the material I am visiting is dated and timeless pointing out how so unaware we walk through Life.
The waning days of Summer 2011 entice a review of my journey these last 90, a Quarterly Review of sorts - who says our clients should be the only ones to get QBRs?
This summer has been about breaking through Stage 1 and Stage 2 - wait, that's not 100% - before I could breakthrough, I needed to 'remember' Stage 1 and Stage 2...so yes, now I see S1/S2 completely. Table stakes. Temporary.
"Just over three years ago, when I started writing about copiers, MpS, technology, selling and pole dancing, I was one of three. Back then, if one were to Google “managed print services,” the dozen or so returns would’ve consisted of wedding invitation printers and “full-serve” print advertising providers.
There were few fleet monitoring alternatives and fewer proactive supplies management solutions. Hardly anyone mentioned cost reduction, business process, fleet optimization or phases. And nobody championed reducing costs by reducing prints, copies, or printers and copiers.
This isn’t to say nobody serviced printers or supplied toner. Yes, some were “optimizing” fleets, shifting volume, addressing document workflow and business process or managing hundreds of devices, but we..."
Get the rest of the story at The Imaging Channel blogs, The Imaging of Greg.
“Business Acumen” is a cool way to say, “been there, done that…got three years' financials to prove it” – I admit, it is a big word, does it scare you?
From Merriam-Webster:
Acumen: keenness and depth of perception, discernment, or discrimination especially in practical matters.
Practical Matters.
Lots of salespeople don’t think they have acumen, or that there is some special process that goes with acquiring the skill of discernment. Worse, some employers don’t believe their employees possess keenness – more than a few sales managers feel their salespeople lack depth of perception.
You know I’m right. You’ve seen it, I’ve seen it, we’ve all been there.
What to do?
Stand back, there is something going on here, something new; The New Age of Selling. It has nothing to do with the Mayan calendar although "The New Age" calls upon the collective selling skills of the past 25,000 years.
Woah, heavy.
I know it’s difficult to see, but the current economic “Charlie Foxtrot” will someday be in our rear view mirror. When the recovery does start, for real, the new selling professional will lead the way. I believe that our industry, our sales people, in the trenches, will be examples of success, role models.
The New Way demands more from you, the Selling Professional:
Collaboration – be open to working with everyone, yesterday’s rivals could be today’s partner
Engagement/Intent – work with your clients, partners, peers at a deeper level, with High Intent
Growth – thrive on change, bring change, be the agent for change
The New Way also exists in a new environment, a business context that has never existed:
Information is everywhere – Content and data are universal and will permeate
Power is shifting down – from the OEMs to the cube farms, personal power is increasing
Technology is mundane – your refrigerator will talk with your toaster
“Citizen Mobil” – brick and mortar is dead. Smartphones, tablets, wireless and G4 networks, you, your clients, and clients’ family and kids are processing business everywhere. Think Cold Calls from the beach.
The times are different and personal acumen is more relevant, you are much more relevant, and in context.
One more thing: There are No Academic Experts. We're making this up as we go - and because this is all new, dynamic, and changing every 30 days, formal, teaching experts are simply rehashing history - not projecting
The New Selling, not Sales 2.0 or 3.1, let’s call it, Sales X dot XX - “Sales X.Xx"
In view humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi now vacant, vanished.
However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin, vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.
The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.
Verily this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that its my very good honour to meet you and you may call me V."
Yeah, I know, the electric paper trick has been around for decades.
Below is the latest:
"I think the greatest breakthrough was that traditional display devices usually require electricity to write, but our technology made it closer to how we would use normal paper," said John Chen, Vice President of the Institute and general director of the Display Technology Center.
The more interesting advancement revolves around micro-robots.
In our little industry, one can live or die on the difference between 3% and 8%.
The white spaces between the toner, Fact and Fiction, Vision and Reality.
Between all those Silo's.
I first saw Peter's presentation online, from the MPS Conference in Barcelona.
My impressions were, "...who the hell is this guy? A shorter version of T. Robbins only from New Zealand?"
I know, its Australia...and everyone is shorter than Anthony Robbins.
I jest!
Peter's conversation was geared toward innovation, technology and miscalculations. He talked about how our beliefs and more importantly, how our successful past, holds us back. He talked about the silo's that keep us separated and how the cracks present the best opportunities.