Copier Buying Tip- Keep the Future in Mind

The purpose of this blog is to pretty straightforward. To save you time, money and pain when buying a copier for your business. professional practice or church. Whenever I see what seems like a buying mistake made by a business I try to bring it to you in hopes that you won’t repeat others mistakes.

Recently I was working with a customer in Baltimore who bought a copier from my company about 4 years. The customer bought the copier from someone else in the company so I was not the person who originally sold the customer this copier.

When I sat down with the customer and began to ask him some questions to get familiar with his business he expressed his dissatisfaction that the copier he has currently wasn’t keeping up with the needs of his business. He had recently began to experience some service issues with the copier and felt he had actually been “undersold” when he purchased the copier.

In other words he felt that the previous representative from my company that he worked with didn’t sell him a machine that was made for the high volumes he was printing and copying.

Upon further review of his account I realized that the original service agreement he signed 4 years ago was for 20,000 copies/prints per month and they were now doing over 80,000 per month.

I asked him if the company has grown over the last 4-5 years and he expressed that the growth has been significant. I explained to him that based on my research his volumes had increased significantly over that last 4+ years and that when he originally purchased the copier he himself felt that 20,000 copies/prints per month was sufficient.

It really wasn’t the previous salesperson’s fault. She thought she was doing the right thing at the time. The only mistake she may have made was to neglect to ask the customer about their growth expectations. At that point if the customer was anticipating rapid growth maybe higher volume model could have been recommended.

I quickly remedied the issue by recommending that the customer purchase either 2- 65 page per minute copiers or one 135 page per minute copier. Having 2- 65 page per minute copiers has some advantages over 1- 135 page per minute copier like the ability to have 2 people sending faxes at once.

In the end this customer opted for one copier but the moral of the story is when buying a new copier keep in mind that if you anticipate company growth you may want to go one or 2 models up from what you current needs warrant.

If you don’t, you may end up having service issues when the copier is being used more than the manufacturer recommends for that model.

Also keep in mind that manufacturers tend to exaggerate the number of monthly copies/prints their machines can reasonably handle without having service issues. Sometimes I get a good laugh when I read manufacturers brochures. I have no idea why they put such unrealistic numbers on these spec sheets but I find all manufacturers do it.

The other option is to keep in mind that you may have to expand your copier budget to purchase a second machine while you still have an active lease on the first one.

If you choose the two copier option keep in mind that you don’t want to wait until your first copier is having a lot of service issues to add the second one. By that time the first one may be burnt out and have to be replaced well before the lease ends. This would defeat the purpose of the strategy.

So the copier buying tip today is to keep future needs in mind when purchasing a new copier for your business.

Thanks for stopping by and reading. If you have any questions  or comments please feel free to fill out the form below.

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