Printing & Imaging Blog

Tom Callinan, managing principal for strategy development at Strategy Development Inc. offers some additional advice (see previous blog post). One strategy is to look for new ways to attract additional dollars from existing customers. “From a sales perspective, the easiest prospect is one that already trusts you and you have credibility with. So go after your own account base first,” Callinan says.

Particularly attractive customers are those that have signed up for server, telephony, networking, or other managed services. So if you’re managing a company’s network infrastructure, ask if you can do an assessment of its printing environment to offer some potentially money-saving advice in that area, Callinan explains.

“You’ll want to figure out who your contacts are in the account and what contact levels you need to have that you don’t have” for selling printing services, he adds.

“The person that made the decision on the network services may not be the person who will make the decision for print-management agreements. So develop ways over the long term to cultivate those relationships inside of the account so that you can leverage the credibility you have with networking or other services.”