Originally Posted by
schooltech
I believe that one of the key points to making connectivity go a bit easier is to "TRY" to get sales and service on the same page. When sales heads back to the office with a potential sale, write it up, move the box to the customer, and then set up the network call with dispatch. A tech goes out to install it and the customer says, "We'd like the machine to print from over there," fifty feet from any sort of network drop, as an example. Of course, this doesn't stop there, because now the machine also needs to support features that their office network will not properly support, whatever that problem is.
I guess what I'm saying is that if the people doing the installs can talk to their techs, if they use a company, or at least head out and survey the environment, they can even have the machine IP installed, for instance, so when the machine goes out there, it makes the installation quite a bit easier. I developed for our company a network survey form that the salespeople used. Surprisingly, it worked very well, as I kept it simple, yet effective. It made many of the subsequent installations much easier, and we had customers that were impressed with the smoothe installs.
Also, in these years, salespeople should be CDIA+ certified, so they will feel more comfortable "selling" the IT portion, and bring a company IT person to help talk-the-talk with anyone else. If some companies require their techs to be certified, why should the salespeople not also be certified to sell highly advanced pieces of equipment? It is a tall order for some companies, as complacency is an easy road to go down.
Bookmarks