You have three copier lease quotes on your desk. They all look about the same. The monthly payments are within $20 of each other. So what do you actually compare? The monthly payment is the trap. It is the one…
Three copier lease quotes look almost identical until you put them in a spreadsheet. Then the truth comes out. The “cheapest” quote turns into the most expensive once you add up clicks and fees. The middle quote turns out to…
One quote is a price. Three quotes is a market. The difference between leasing on a single quote and leasing after three quotes is usually thousands of dollars. Yet most small businesses still pick the first rep who calls back.…
Competitive bidding is the cheat code for copier leases. Buyers who run a real bidding process pay 20% to 40% less than buyers who just take the first quote. The catch: most “competitive” processes are not actually competitive. They are…
A bid request is not the same thing as asking for a quote. A quote is a friendly reply from a salesperson. A bid request is a formal document that locks every dealer into the same questions, the same scope,…
If you are buying or leasing a copier worth more than $5,000, you should be sending a proper request for proposal. Not a phone call. Not a “send me a quote” email. A real RFP. The dealers who actually want…
Most people walk into a copier lease negotiation the same way they walk into a car dealership in 1995. The dealer has all the info. You have a monthly payment goal and zero leverage. You leave with a five year…
Copier dealers are not in the copier business. They are in the financing and service business. The machine itself is the smallest part of how they make money. If you understand where their real profit lives, you can negotiate from…
Here is the part dealers do not want printed in their brochures. The average copier lease has somewhere between 30% and 60% markup baked into it. Some of that is normal. Most of it is negotiable. And almost none of…
You sat down with a copier dealer, got a quote, and somewhere in the paperwork you saw a tiny number like .00185. That little number is called the money factor, and it controls how much interest you are paying every…