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The Fastest Sale
March 3, 2008

Images of trade shows and conferences will no doubt stay in my mind forever, having spent the better part of the last 15 years haunting the halls of one event or another. I admit it, I am a groupie.

This week here in Boston, the venerable On-Demand Show takes up space at the Expo Center. I had gone to the first six or so before taking a couple of years off, but have it in my calendar to return starting tomorrow.

The nice thing for me isn’t so much the thinly-veiled self-promotional seminars or the booth tours where well dressed men tout beige equipment that does everything that the other guys’ beige equipment can’t but rather the fact that there are lots of mucky-mucks hanging around in one place, saving me lots of time because I generally want something from these people.

Printers are walking around with their Halloween bags looking for booths with fun giveaways and trying at all costs to avoid looking anyone in the eye for fear that they will actually have to talk to a rep. Lunch will set you back $15 and leave you wishing you could find some Pepto Bismal.  Ah yes, good times.

The image that is burned into my memory at this show, however, is one from probably 8 or 9 years back when it was at the Jacob Javitts Center in New York City. There was a booth in the back of the hall staffed by three men. Printers were lined up six deep, all clamoring for a chance to buy. Many had credit cards in hand holding them over head trying to buy the precious product being sold.

Was it a digital device? Was it a variable data application? No and no. The men were selling a software program that had to do with creating rubber stamps on the spot. The price was under $100 as I recall, and it was as if they were selling the only bottled water in the desert. I sat there amazed and took note of the many messages that was being sent:

•    Printers want fast solutions, fast products to sell!
•    Printers are impatient. They want sales NOW!
•    The price point for stuff to sell to printers is under $100!
•    The bigger a crowd gets, the more people show up for it.

Okay, I made that last one up, but the point is that in a hall full of “the future of printing” solutions and iron that can do stuff unimaginable ten years ago the hottest thing on the floor was a good old fashioned rubber stamp maker which allows printers to generate tens of dollars of profit each and every week.
Woo hoo!

New from Xerox: The $99 Docutech! Please form one line and don’t push, we will get to you all!

Posted by Bill Farquharson on March 3, 2008 | Comments (0)