Quick Printing

As the pilot picked his way between airplane-eating thunderheads that towered above 40,000 feet, I started to question the wisdom of boarding the flight from Rochester to Cincinnati. The weather forecast had been dicey at best, but I wanted to get home after almost two weeks on the road. My most recent stop had been to keynote the Xerox Thought Leadership Workshop for quick and small commercial printers. The event had been very informative, but I was surprised how little the attendees knew about the sales and marketing tools Xerox could provide.

As I thought about it later, I probably shouldn’t have been that surprised. Far too many printers I have run into are either not aware of or not inclined to take advantage of such useful tools that can help them build their sales and profitability.

Many years ago, vendors sold boxes. When that approach petered out, they sold “solutions,” which were usually boxes linked together. Finally, however, they realized that in order to maintain their customer base, they had a vested interest in keeping their customers in business. Thus began the effort to provide business, sales, and marketing resources for their customers. Sure, each vendor reserves their particular tool kit for users of their equipment or software, but that’s as it should be. My question is, if one does own equipment or software from a particular vendor, why don’t they take advantage of those resources? I guess it’s probably for the same reasons that franchisees don’t take advantage of available franchise resources or association members don’t take advantage of association resources. Maybe excuses would be a better term than reasons.

Anyway, we were the last aircraft to land and offload before the airport was shut down. I checked the weather on my computer and made a decision to take advantage of the resources available to me by having the agent at the Delta Crown Room book me a hotel and reschedule me for a next-day flight. By the time the rest of the traveling public realized that the quarter-sized hail pelting the airport meant cancelled flights, I was comfortably resting in my room getting ready to fight another day. After all, if you have resources, why not use them?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 3:08 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.