Premium Digital holds its own in one of the most competitive markets in the country, thanks, in part, to a personal approach.
Top: Premium Digital Managing Partners Gary Alessio, Alan Schwartz, and Van Seretis; Above: Examples of promotional products Premium Digital can create for clients.
Don’t believe the naysayers.
The ones who say a small dealer can’t compete in a market where large dealers have sizable footprints and OEM direct branches blanket the region.
And whatever you do, don’t tell that to the two principals””Alan Schwartz and Van Seretis””at Premium Digital in Parsippany, New Jersey. That’s because this modest-sized dealership, whose history traces back to 1999, has an impressive track record of competing against much larger competitors, thanks to an uncompromising commitment to building strong customer relationships.
“We are a speed boat compared to a cruise ship,” said Schwartz. “The big guys are the cruise ships. We’re more personalized. We’ve been doing this for a long time””30-plus years””and we still have many of the same clients.”
Those clients range from small mom-and-pop SMBs to Fortune 500 companies.
Schwartz started out as a technician working for Pitney Bowes while going to school. By the time he was 20, he had moved into sales after realizing there was a cap on how much money a tech could make.
Seretis’s cousin was one of his mentors, and he introduced Schwartz to Seretis who had started in this industry in 1994. They’ve been friends and business partners for the past 25 years.
Premium Digital has 15 employees, including nine sales reps (the ninth just started in June) and four techs. For a small company, Premium Digital covers a lot of territory, serving Morris, Passaic, and Essex counties in New Jersey, as well as Manhattan. When necessary, it partners with other dealers, providing service to those dealers’ clients who have offices in the region. Those relationships are often reciprocal, and Premium’s clients with offices in Colorado, California, Chicago, and Dallas are served by dealers in those markets, including some dealers of significant size like DEX and POA.
Customer Focused
Even customers who buy a $500 MFP from Premium are treated like they invest $1 million, and often are touched by Schwartz and Seretis, who have made a point of establishing their own personal relationships with 80% to 90% of the dealership’s customers, even when they aren’t the lead sales rep on the account.
Seretis has a client to whom he sold a copier in 1994. That client has a 35-ppm black & white MFP, but according to Seretis, this client tells him he treats him like he’s IBM. That says it all about how Premium Digital takes care of clients.
“We are men of our word and handshake guys,” stated Seretis. “If I tell you I’m going to do this, consider it done. It’s the old school of keeping in touch with your clients, not just doing the 36-month lease and see you in three to five years.”
Seeing how some of his larger competitors’ sales reps tend to forget the customer after the sale, Schwartz makes sure his reps touch each client every quarter, whether it’s a phone call, email, or visit. Personal visits are paramount because Schwartz emphasizes those meetings uncover new opportunities.
“You can’t do that over an email, you’re not going to see their environment sitting behind your desk,” maintained Schwartz. “That seems to be the newer generation salesperson. Everybody tells them, make that hundred calls on the phone, send out those 200 email blasts and see what you get. We want you to work the phones, but we want a combination of the phones, the emails, and facetime. Cold calling still works.”
“We act as more of a consultant,” added Seretis. “We want to consult with our client, because they may not be ready for a piece of equipment right now. But they may need print management services. They may need print services.”
“And don’t be a used car salesman,” said Schwartz. “You have to be smart. My dad was in sales his whole life and he’s always told me, if you push your customer or potential customer, you might get them once, but if you push them into a corner and they signed just to get you out of the office, they probably won’t stay with you. If you listen to what your customer wants, you’ll probably keep them forever.”
Schwartz and Seretis are concerned about the price erosion that’s impacting the industry.
“That’s a problem because people, for lack of a better word, need better skillsets to sell the value,” said Schwartz. “You can’t be a Walmart. We’re going to give you much better service, much better response [time], but you can’t get the best price and the best service because something has to give.”
Premium Digital also sets itself from competitors by not escalating leases and by handling its own deliveries and pickups compared to some competitors that outsource those jobs.
Product Line
Premium sells Konica Minolta, Lexmark, and recently added Brother A4 machines to the mix. It also sells Panasonic scanners and uses LMI for its MPS offering. Premium recently partnered with All Covered to provide managed services and VoIP. During our visit, Schwartz was beaming about nailing Premium’s first VoIP IT deal.
Premium has shown that being a small dealership doesn’t limit opportunities to diversify beyond traditional office technology. The company offers a host of marketing solutions, including graphic design, printing and copying, and direct mail services; trade show products and signs and banners; and promotional products. Two years ago, Premium brought in a childhood friend of Schwartz, Gary Alessio, as a managing partner. Alessio comes with a wealth of printing experience and his printing business of over 25 years, which has been instrumental in helping the company diversify.
One client, a recycling company, now uses Premium to print the forms it uses for tracking incoming scrap metal. That was a 100,000-piece order! According to Seretis, six-figure print deals are not atypical. However, those transactions have led to sales of MFPs, postage equipment, and other office technology.
The Extra Mile
Premium is used to dealing with adversity. For example, Seretis is proud of how the company survived the financial crisis. It didn’t decrease staff and didn’t lose clients. It may have lost some print volume, and clients may not have needed as many machines, but they didn’t leave Premium. And Premium didn’t leave them.
“We stuck by them because when the money dried up and people were in really tough shape, we rented them used equipment, where it was a win-win for the client and us,” noted Schwartz. “It’s always got to be a partnership.”
When Hurricane Sandy hit and some of Premium’s customers’ businesses were underwater, Premium found a way to provide those companies with used machines so they could get back in business once the waters subsided.
“Things like that will always differentiate us,” said Seretis. “The minute someone signs with us, we tell them that copier, it’s on us. We will deliver it, we will install it, we will train you. It’s always been like that. We’ve had clients that have moved across the street to a new building. We moved their machines for them free of charge. We don’t nickel and dime our clients.”
That pretty much sums up Premium Digital””a small dealer who goes the extra mile to take care of its clients and does so in a way that makes the dealership excel against the quite formidable, larger competition.
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