Copier Sales, Is It For You?

Copier sales can be a dirty concept for many people. They think about having to make a bunch of cold calls and suffering through many rejections to try and build their base. If you have thought about doing copier sales for a living, this article is for you. We will discuss what you can expect to be doing and what you can expect to make selling copiers as a profession.

We have been selling copiers for over 12 years and have a great understanding of this business, so we wanted to go over what a career selling copiers would look like, and we are always hiring good sales reps in almost any US market if the skill level is high enough.

What Can I Make?

The average copier sales rep should make a starting wage around $50,000 per year when factoring in commissions and bonuses per year. The experienced rep tends to make more, not because they get paid more for experience, but because they know people at businesses and can leverage those relationships to sales faster. We would expect the average advantage to having some experience to be at least a 20% advantage (getting to $60k rather than $50k).

One of the cool parts is most good copier companies will not cap your earnings, meaning the best of the best can make over $200,000 per year. These are unicorns, of course, so a new rep should not expect this to be instant. This tends to happen when the rep lands a few whale accounts that helps them sell hundreds of units per year.

So, from a salary perspective, money is there, but there are other areas that can pay more, like Managed IT or software sales for some professionals. What can happen is a new rep may start with copiers, practice their craft and then move to software sales over time.

What Will I Do?

One of the big questions you may have, is what will I do? If you are inside sales or outside sales will have a big factor. For inside sales, this tends to be more of a farming activity. You nuture relationships and help solve issues. For outside sales, this tends to be a hunting exercise, getting new accounts. The higher paying tends to be outside sales because it is harder to find someone good at getting new clients than it is to find people to be nice to current clients.

You will normally ask some qualifying questions to see where a prospect is.

• How long until your copier lease ends?
• What do you pay per month?
• How do you workflow documents in your office (to help do document management sales)
• What speed do you need?
• What do you pay per print?
• etc

Once the client is qualified, you will deliver proposals to try and get them to become a client. It can be a fun challenge to find creative ways to get the attention of future buyers. The ultimate measure of success is your numbers and how much you are selling and how much profit do those sales bring in?

What is bad about copier sales?

Having sold copiers for a long time, there are parts each person won’t like. So, this is more of a perspective of a few reps, not specifically what may bug you. Some of the things we don’t enjoy are the following.

• Manufacturer delays that seem to be random and make promises we made not happen
• Clients running out of toner at 4PM on a Friday and expecting we will drop everything to get them another toner that same day
• Clients who change computers and then get mad because their copier doesn’t print (because the drivers are not on the new computer), and then saying the copier is bad because it should “just work”
• Selling small devices which have no real profit, but require the same amount of support as larger units.
• No one is too excited about copiers, so it is really hard to get an audience for your company.
• Customers not wanting to have the conversations about how to improve their situations

Ultimately, the copier is like an offensive lineman in football. If you are thinking about the copier, something is wrong. People prefer to be on auto-pilot with their copier.

Copier sales is generally a profession where people get REALLY good at what they are doing and get some awesome clients, or it tends to be a springboard into other types of tech sales.

If you are looking for a copier sales job, we probably have a position open and you should consider chatting with us too. If you have an interest in selling from a remote location or a home office, we even have ways to accomodate for this. Let us know if you are looking to start a professional career selling copiers!