Selling printers the easy way

The key factor to remember when trying to sell a solution to customers — no matter what industry they’re from or their technical expertise — is that you need to know their business and the challenges they face.

Don’t worry about trying to sell tech specs or “speeds and feeds” — that’s not what’s going to get the sale across the line.

Colour wonderful
One aspect to consider highlighting the benefits of is colour. Colour printing emerged from advertising agencies and design studios a few years ago and is now being broadly taken up by businesses of all sizes. There are many advantages of colour printing in the office environment, including:

• Capturing attention — colour emphasises critical information and increases a reader’s attention span and recall by 82 percent. That means your customer’s customers are more likely to buy.

• Enhancing productivity — colour reduces search time and errors by up to 80 percent, making lengthy documents more understandable and helping customers fill out forms easier.

• Improving communication — colour increases comprehension by as much as 73 percent. That means customers can run presentations faster and more effectively.

• Better sales — coloured collateral generates higher sales than black and white materials, and it can improve brand recognition by up to 80 percent.

Target market
So, who can you target when selling colour printers?

There are traditionally four broad categories for colour printing applications, which include:

1. Business — to impress, convince, sell ideas, improve clarity and communicate more effectively.

2. Graphic arts and creative communities — at the design level and pre-press proofs for client review.

3. Engineering and scientific — to aid in data analysis and simplify complex information.

4. Print-on-demand services — to meet the quality and fast turnaround demands for tasks such as real estate flyers, instore signage and labels, restaurant menus, etc.

In addition, a wide variety of businesses are printing colour-intensive materials from the Internet, creating proposals and charts that would benefit from colour graphics, and generating in-house communications.

The opportunity for expanding colour into the office environment is almost limitless, if you show the customer the benefits to their business.

By Tom Lewis, marketing manager and
printer channel operations manager, Fuji Xerox