The Demo From Hades: This Is What Happens When You Take Your Eye Off Your Opponent

10/2009

We have all done it. The seasoned of us, have committed it more often.

Twenty minutes of hell demonstrating the greatest contribution to office productivity and flubbing up every, single thing.

Face Plant. Flameout. Bunkered. Epic Fail.

It wasn't the machine's fault, a matter of fact, the Edgeline was in great shape, the best ever; someone even cleaned the chassis. Trays were set correctly, scanning worked, print driver was installed and at the ready.

So I couldn't blame the machine.

The MPS pre-work had been established; a study conducted, and the decision for the copiers had been wrestled away from purchasing and handed over to IT.

The small fleet was old, oversold and the leases expired.

My proposal made sense didn't grow into a 10-pound, thousand-page monstrosity, and even included Visio flowcharts. Cool.

The prospects' approval process had been defined, and documented and we were are track. The Economic, and Technical influencers were identified and covered.

I had a Coach and End-Users interviewed. As a final stage, my coach was bringing the last remaining end-user to our offices so she could just take a "quick" peek at the Edgeline.

Can you see this train wreck coming?

To be certain, I am not the best at "the demo" - and I think those who are, commit way too much time, standing at the machine, learning the myriad of never-used functions.

I loathe copier training disguised as "sales" training - you know the ones - all speeds and feeds and why this guy's toner is more round than that one's...gag.

But also, I have demoed Oces with cold cans of Coca-Cola in them. I have run dozens of Edgelines with the doors open - if you've never seen it, it is glorious.

I've scanned coffee-stained UPS Red shipping tickets through many Canon ADFs and received 99% hit OCR rates.

Who hasn't had a toner bottle explode while showing how "easy it is" to replace?

Yes, I have even "made up" a flip-chart presentation while that damn space shuttle icon was prepared for and finally launched(Konica/Minolta) because some goody-goody, decided to power down the unit 10 minutes before my client arrived.

And the ultimate bar story - I have demoed a machine that had no power; I just used the word "imagine" a great deal.

So yeah, I can dance through most anything. Most.

But I prefer to have all the variables nailed down. Like, what kind of documents will be copied, are there any specific functions to be reviewed, and will you ever need a heavier bond?

Are you printing PDFs, and if so, can you send me a file ahead of the demo, so we can be prepared? And what about envelopes?

Do you need and will you need to see 11x17, in color?

Stuff like that. The boring, mundane, bland, everyday functions that a copier should be able to perform. The simple things.

The dark partner of concern shuddered my foundation of confidence when I saw her meaty hand clutching the manila folder of documents. Her heels clicked across our reception area tile like the ticking of some angry clock. Oh boy.

But I thought to myself, "Should be no problem...they print more than copy...".

Well, she pulled out a full color, highly detailed, 11x17 map - generated from an older inkjet - .BMP, not even. PDF.

My question to her was why would you ever copy something like this if you could print it? Don't you receive these documents (hard copy, bound, site survey, and maps) in electronic form?

Mind you, I recognized the engineering company that generated the document. The same company I sold a few wide-format devices and a color Canon unit to three years ago.

The Canon came with E*Copy Desktop. And I remember spending an hour showing them how to assemble multi-page. PDF documents so they could email final reports to their clients, saving thousands on courier charges. I knew that she had the report in digital form.

"No", her response.

"So, you dismantle the report, scan them and then make copies? Is that the process?

"Yes", her response.

I know, logic does not apply, but it didn't matter. This is how she does it now, and this is the process she wants to see my machine perform.

My weakness - my unit scans at 600 dpi and outputs 1200 so the output was clearly sub-standard. I had to agree.

Oh, and sometimes, they need to duplex 11x17, at the machine and hate the speed of their existing Xerox.

Carefully explaining how the Edgeline applies the ink, reads the surface of the paper, and either re-applies ink with another pass or runs the sheet around again until the ink is dry - this makes the speed of output decrease but ensures higher quality.

She wasn't having any of it.

The scan quality sucked, and the speed slowed to an unbearable crawl. Game, set, match, I took five in the back.

The Postmortem - "Somebody Call Dexter, we got blood here..."

What did we learn?

Know what the heck you are getting into before you get into it. More importantly, MPS is a big deal, a compelling argument, but when it gets right down to it, it's the basics that either make or break you - always has been, always will be.

Remember the basics.

Hey, this isn't easy, if it were, your manager would still be in sales.

Keep getting up and keep selling.