The gap intelligence MFP Copier team recently completed another successful client presentation tour in the U.S. and Japan this fall. Without a doubt, a major theme of our client discussions focused on identifying ways to drive growth and improve operations amid numerous industry challenges.
There is no shortage of challenges facing the 78-year-old copier industry in 2016 and beyond. As device and page demand plateaus due to the rise of digital alternatives and ongoing generational behavioral shifts, sales execution and operational efficiency have become even greater components of nearly all manufacturers’ go-to-market strategy. It goes without saying that these factors were already very important.
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gap intelligence’s suite of print sales enablement and analytics tools was built to address these needs, combining its signature GFD product and pricing data with a trio of solution platforms. This powerful trio of solution platforms empowers manufacturer’s internal marketing teams, direct sales organizations, and independent resellers to quickly identify and communicate their respective competitive advantages.
As a business development professional myself, I know all too well that winning more deals more efficiently is crucial to achieve one’s sales goal, and that is exactly what gapCompare, gapTCO, and SalesDrive do.
1. gapCompare – Head-to-head analysis of product specifications to highlight your product advantage
gap intelligence’s suite of print sales enablement and analytics tools address the needs of numerous roles, but the most universally relevant is the gapCompare product comparison solution. gapCompare was created with a focus on efficiency, allowing industry professionals to quickly select a list of competitive products by default core attributes or custom criteria, compare specifications and capabilities across selected products, and ultimately produce reports. It is designed to enable manufacturers to make better product marketing decisions faster and prepare sales professionals to help their customers understand the advantages of their products.
2. gapTCO – Total Cost of Ownership calculation to present your cost efficiency value proposition
gapTCO Pro takes you one step further. In addition to highlighting your product differentiation against the competition, gapTCO calculates your customer’s total cost of ownership (or running cost) savings in just a few simple steps. The user-friendly, yet intuitive tool, allows a sales professional to customize the usage environment to reflect a real life scenario, build your own product configuration, calculate the total cost of ownership by automatically applying the most current street pricing information, and generate a comprehensive sales proposal. You spend less time analyzing and more time selling. A marketing professional may utilize the gapTCO tool to broadcast a specific product go-to-market strategy by sharing a scenario among the gapTCO users throughout the organization, with just a click of a button. Why duplicate the effort when everyone is working towards the same goal; selling your product by presenting clear customer values.
3. SalesDrive – Smarter and faster solution to the Managed Print Service assessment and proposal generation
The MPS sales process can be complex and lengthy. SalesDrive, powered by gap intelligence, shortens the entire sales cycle with a streamlined process guiding you every step of the way from importing, capturing, assessment to the proposal stage. Once a device usage report is uploaded, products are matched using the gap database saving you hours of manual identification process. Take an iPad loaded with the CaptureIT app to the customer asset walk-through and collect the device location information to be uploaded for the mapping process. Using the cloud base desktop platform, makes it extremely easy and quick to generate a customer proposal for a newly optimized solution. I’ve heard clients say, “This is too good to be true!”
As I noted at the beginning, there is no room for operational inefficiencies, but a crucial need to capture all the sales opportunities possible in today’s print industry. We at gap intelligence understand this customer need and our suite of print sales enablement and analytical tools are available to address this.
If you are interested in finding out more about any of these tools, contact us at tco@gapintelligence.com today.
