When I got back into the business-to-business technology sales game about 9 months ago I wasn’t overly surprised to find that the Xerox product line that I am representing is seldom the low-price bidder for business. Xerox is the last American manufacturer left in this segment (Xerox still manufactures more than 50% of its product line in the U.S. ) and at the low-end of the market products manufactured in Asia by Asian companies are the price leaders. The same thing happened with computers and most consumer electronics years ago. Once a product set becomes viewed by the buying public as a commodity it immediately becomes a lowest price wins game.
One thing that I now have to spend quite a bit of time on with potential customers is educating them about why these essential office machines are not a commodity and what to look for to differentiate between similar looking devices, especially as it relates to real value. There has to be a defensible reason for someone to pay more to buy my product, even though “Buy American” is at least a good reason to pause and look at the products in some detail.
I generally explain the Xerox differences by focusing upon two main categories of real value to the buyer – product features/functions (how they impact the buyer’s work environment) and business practices (how dealing with Xerox gives buyers some very real and tangible benefits). If the potential customer can’t see the Xerox differences and value in those two broad categories, then they are really not a prospect, just a shopper and I don’t do well with shoppers.
Xerox spends a lot of design effort and money on making sure that our machines are the most effective machines that you can buy. A major part of that is the designed in capability for multitasking. All modern machines, from all the vendors can make a valid claim to be multifunctional; that is, they all have the ability to do copying, printing, scanning and faxing. The palce where most, if not all of the Xerox competitors fall down is being able to do more than one of those things at a time or being able to multitask. In order to be able to multitask the machine has to be designed with separate resources for the separate functions. Xerox machines are designed that way. Others are not.
In most Xerox machines thee are separate, dedicated resources (processor, memory and other resources) for the print engine, the san engine and the fax engine. That means that you can start a large print job (either sent as a print job from a PC or a large copy job) and still make use of the scanning capabilities of the machine or send a Fax. Those resources aren’t tied up by the big print job. On toerh machines, once that print job starts, everyone with any other job will just stand around and wait – the whole machine is consumed by that one job. It is this designed-in ability to do multiple jobs at once that gives Xerox machines such a big edge when they are tested for effectiveness using typical work scenarios. That is why year after year Xerox models show up as the most effective machines in the tests run my independent tester Buyers Labs Inc. There are other designed in factors that I can discuss with you at length.
The second big category of difference is in the Xerox practices, especially as they relate to leases, which is the most commonly used way customers get a multifunction machine. Xerox leases come without the many hidden charges that other vendors don’t tell their clients about until the bill arrives. It’s “Oh, did we forget to mention the delivery and set-u charges?” Or, maybe, “Well, of course, you have to pay for insurance while you have t machine and for property taxes, too; didn’t we mention that up front?” Or maybe, “Certainly, you have to pay for shipping of your supplies. You didn’t expect not to, did you?” Those are a few areas that other vendors use to recoup some of the money they may have lost by appearing to be the low-cost vendor.
So, the bottom line here is that these devices are not commodities. They are not all alike. And, other company’s business practices may add significantly to what you thought was going to be the lowest cost. Call me and let’s explore this further.
