What is everyone in sales doing about connecting? My sales know connecting and it gets to be alot of work for them. When they make the sales we include an hour free for connecting,scan etc on the sales contract. But, then alot of time the salesperson ends up connecting (customer says "just a simple set up"), then it turns into hours between set up print/scan etc. Then the customer calls constantly, "new computers, employees to set up scanning; forgot this one, etc". Now the sales person is still doing free IT. They have a hard time getting out of it. We let the customer know, we offer additional support at hourly rate. they get bent out of shape, because they want the sales person to take care of them. Obviously for free. Any suggestions, to help out sales professionally, without pissing off customers. thanks

Spell it out in the original machine quote in writing. We offer x hours of free support after that it will be billed at the rate of $x.
I usually give them 1 or 2 freebies after that, but by the 3rd one, they KNOW they will pay. It really cuts down on them trying to get free IT work. Its funny, they know they will have to pay a regular IT company to do the same thing they want us to do for free. It is a mind set that it is our job to change.

you must have some pretty savvy sales people to be doing IT work for customers, that should be service side, unless they really want to do it for some reason. Are the sale people getting paid by the hour to do it or what? On initial installs of a sold machine I pretty much set up whatever they want if they have the capability on their network side, yes this can get into hours and hours, we used to do 3 to 5 machines and that was it but that led to ill feelings on the customers side. When all is set up I hand the customer a document, very simple that states all printing/scanning/netfaxing/emailing/ etc. etc. is set up and working properly it is signed by me and the customer, the form clearly states any additional netowork services i.e. troubleshooting, setting up additional PC's, non-hardware (copier or printer) related issues/problems are billable at $XXX per hour. When customers call the dispatcher for a printing network related call they are informed again at that time if it is not found to be a problem with the hardware, they will be billed.

No more free IT work from our Company, that got old fast, I also get a lot of calls for free phone support which we are trying to get a handle on, I like helping the customers a lot but they will try to take advantage of our services, whereas an IT company tells them up front, "what's your credit card number, thanks". We're finally recouping some revenue in that area.

Sales connecting the equipment? New idea for me, but not bad, as long as they know what they are doing. We had one guy that did it all: Install, instruct and connect, He used to be a tech (I think it was me!).
We too, used to connect every pc we could to the MFP, we wanted EVERYONE to use our product. There were times that it got pretty involved, but it usually paid off. We used to include 2hrs. of network time into the sale, after that all work was billable @ our hourly rate, unless the customer wanted to buy a block of time (usually slightly discounted). Worked out pretty well- I'm w/a much smaller company now , but as far as I know my old company is still doing it that way.

I like your idea Airborne. We usually put on our sales contract the amount of time included in delivery. But, they still try for more and more all for free!!! But, a checklist should do the trick, with a signature line and info to call office for addtional support at labor rate. thanks everyone

We include setup of one machine. Almost any time a sales person has tried to set one up for me I've been on the phone longer than it would have taken me to set it up myself. Frequently end up having to do it myself after the long phonecall anyway.

I do require the customer to provide any network connections as well and charge extra if I have to run cables.

I deal with this problem all the time. I tell customers that I can try and walk them through setting up new print/scan users over the phone or I can come out at X dollars per hour. Of course, they always want to try it over the phone and you have to walk them through every single mouse click.

How do you charge a customer for over the phone support? We've never done this before, and I don't think it would go over well with our spoiled customers.

A sale is a sale, but man you can run yourself ragged with the after sale setup. The initial set up can last an entire day in some cases. I agree with Airborne's form idea. That customer's signature will save me a ton of wasted free set up time and will hopefully generate more revenue without hurting customer relations.

I believe some time down the road one of the phone software programs used by tech support companies, like Microsoft uses would have to be implemented, it would be so unprofessional (and I wouldn't do it anyway) for me to ask the customer for thier credit card number or say something like, look the next hour is going to be billed to you at XX amount of dollars. There has to be some standard in place. The best way would be for us to set up remote desktop so we could remote in to thier PC like Kyocera has started doing with thier tech support, saves a lot of time. I literally spend hours a week on the phone with tech support to customers and our techs helping them also, thinking about getting one of those star trek looking phones.

I require the customer to have their I.T. guy or outside computer tech who normally handles all their computer work to be there and I work free. The idea is to increase meter clicks with printing on contracts. Other than I do at times do all PCs for printing I only do real basic and quick scan or other things, other wise they pay for it to a third party.