Turning America's Love For Green Into Cash

It's been said that the surest way to make money is to align yourself with the trends.

With that said, as the sun sets on Earth Day 2007, I find myself wondering just how many copier dealers have chosen to romance (ie. exploit) America's love affair with the "GREEN" movement.

Very few I would suspect. And that's both good news and bad.

It's good news for the dealer who steps up and positions his or her dealership as the town's premier (and only) dealer in support of all things environmentally friendly.

Finally, a unique selling proposition that doesn't involve being the dealer with the lowest prices. Finally, here is a position where it is actually a little easier to convince the customer to pay a little more because doing things in a "GREEN" way is actually a little more costly, but certainly worthwhile to save our country.

However, all the leverage in this strategy goes to the dealer who makes the claim first. "Me too" just doesn't cut it.

Coors was the first I believe to use a similar tactic in it's beer commercials. Struggling to find a unique sales position among all the brewers of the time (who essentially made all the same products with the same ingredients) Coors decided it should proclaim that it used the finest pure mountain spring water. It was a hit! That one simple claim saw sales of Coors beer skyrocket past the other larger and older brewers. What most consumers were not aware of was that all the other brewers also used the finest pure mountain spring water...they just had never thought it was important to tell everyone. Well, it wasn't... until Coors did. Then they were all left needing to shout "Me too". But it was too late.

Right now America loves "GREEN". Most dealership have been operating GREEN for years but not telling anyone. Why not? Well, up until now it really wasn't an exploitable trend.

Now- right now while Earth Day is still on everyone's mind- you should be pulling out all the stops and trumpeting your company's GREEN song all throughout the land. In case even you don't know what's GREEN here's a short list to draw in your focus:

1. You rebuild copiers and printers for resale saving valuable landfill space.
2. You harvest the good parts from old machines to repair and rebuild... again saving landfill
space while reducing the need to manufacture and ship brand new parts.
3. You re-use the packing materials from goods delivered to you for use in the packaged
supplies you send out to your customers.
4. You rebuild and refill used toner and imaging cartridges for reuse. You use a cartridge
return and exchange program to keep costs low and landfill waste down.
5. You save hundreds of gallons of gasoline every year by efficiently routing your technicians.
6. You utilize the telephone as much as possible to cut down on the driving your sales people
must do to meet the needs of your customer base.
7. You optimize the Energy Saver features on all your customer's machines...saving them
money while conserving our nations power resources.
8. Your technicians use only environmentally friendly solvents in maintaining machines.
9. Your technicians utilize vacuum cleaners with micro-particle filtration to prevent the escape
of toner and dust particles into the air.
10. You recycle all of the waste paper generated in your office plus whatever comes from testing
machines prior to delivery.

Well there are just a few ideas you can use to proclaim yourself the King of Green in your town.
Make all the other dealers play catch-up. But the key is...you gotta be the first to call it!
If you're not the leader the view never changes...and that's bad.

Let's get busy now!
Bob