The best phone system for office equipment and print dealers
Appointment setting at volume: take a rep from 60 to 200 calls a day.
Hundreds of companies use 
to make every call pay off
The situation
What holds you back today
A daily call count that is hard to sustain
Prospect lists worked to death and badly tracked
High turnover and slow ramp up for new starters
The answer
What Skipcall changes
Specific to your industry
The four answers you hear all day long
Office equipment is the trade that has always lived on the telephone, and its objections have not changed. They all sound alike because they are nearly always true: the office is already kitted out, the agreement is running, nobody was waiting for your call. The job is not to overturn the objection, it is to put a date on it.
“We are already sorted, we have got an agreement”
True almost everywhere, and it is not a refusal. The three questions that follow are: which finance company, what is the rental, and when does it end. A lease has a term, and the appointment gets booked a few months before it, not on the day you happen to call. A list with end dates written on it is worth more than a list twice the size.
“Send me a brochure”
A polite way of hanging up. Accept without arguing, then lock the next step straight away: “I will email that over and call you Tuesday at ten to see whether the format works for you.” Send it while the conversation is still fresh, and call at the time you said. Without an agreed date, the brochure does nothing at all.
“It is not my decision”
Do not ask for a generic email address, ask for a first name and a job title. In a smaller business the call is split between the owner who signs and the office manager who lives with the breakdowns and knows what really gets printed. Call back quoting the person who pointed you there, because it changes the reception completely.
“Ours works perfectly well”
Never argue with the machine, they chose it. Talk about what they put up with: the time between logging a fault and an engineer turning up, the real cost per page, the number of consumable codes they have to keep on a shelf. One precise question about the last breakdown gets you more than any hardware comparison.
A dated objection is worth more than an appointment forced out of someone. The automatic summary of each call keeps the lease end date and the decision maker's name, so the follow up lands at the right moment rather than wherever the list happens to be.
The script
The script for an appointment setting call in office equipment
You are calling a business that is not expecting you, and you go through a receptionist first. The aim is neither the sale nor the appointment at any price: it is to come away with the decision maker's name and the end date of the current agreement. A call that gives you those two things is a call that worked.
The opener, at reception
“Hello, [full name] from [company]. I am after whoever looks after the copier and the printing, who would that be with you?”
Asking for a very concrete job gets you further than asking for an appointment or naming a department. Reception always knows who rings the engineer when the machine stops.
The opening with the decision maker
“I am not calling to change your machine today, nobody swaps a copier halfway through an agreement. I just want to know who you are with and when it ends, so that I call you at the right time.”
Saying up front that you are not selling anything today is what lets you ask about the finance company, the rental and the end date without being cut off.
If they say you are the tenth to call this week
“I know, it is a trade that does a lot of phoning. So take my name down: I will not call you again before [month], when your agreement is coming up.”
Committing not to call before a given date is the only thing that genuinely separates you from the rest of the week's calls. Provided you keep to it.
If they say to call back in six months
“Fine. I have written down [precise date]. Are you better first thing or late in the day? I will send you a message the day before so you know it is me.”
A date and a time beat “in six months”, which nobody has ever honoured.
If they ask what it costs
“It depends what you actually print. Get me your meter readings and I will give you a serious number. Without them I would be quoting you a figure I would have to revise.”
Asking for the appointment
“What I would suggest is twenty minutes on site, with your meter readings and your last rental invoice in front of us. Tuesday at ten or Thursday at two?”
The visit is useful even when it leads nowhere: the meter readings give you the real print volume, which is the number everybody in this trade is missing.
At Skipcall, every call is recorded, transcribed and summarised, so the script gets corrected against what your reps actually say rather than what we imagine they say.
Avoid this
Three mistakes this industry makes on the phone
The mistake
Closing a negative call by writing “not interested” and nothing else.
Do this instead
Ask the end date question even when the call finishes badly: “it is a lease, when does it run out?” A dated no becomes a future appointment, while a no with no date drops out of the list for good.
The mistake
Quoting a monthly rental on the phone to hook the other person.
Do this instead
A rental depends on the print volume, the term and the funding chosen. Send the figure back to the meter readings: a number given before them will always be lower than the proposal, and your quote will read as an increase.
The mistake
Leaving a voicemail on the main number that announces a copier offer.
Do this instead
That message guarantees you will not be called back and warns the business to screen your number. Better to leave nothing and call at another time, keeping the session for the people who are actually on the line.
Frequently asked questions, Office Equipment & Print
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See what it does on your own lists
A demo runs on your own contacts, not on a sample data set.
Personalized demonstration