A slice of the pie

In the increasingly competitive New Zealand IT market, every opportunity to make extra margin in your sales needs to be acted on. As notebooks and PCs continue to be under margin pressure, accessories, media and consumables are becoming an ever increasing factor in raising the average invoice value of your sale as well as promoting return business and increasing your margin.The accessories market in New Zealand is worth millions of dollars each month and the mass retailers take advantage of this fact through great merchandising, add-on bundles and special offers to enhance the PC or laptop sale.  We have a huge variety of choice in the IT market, from entry-level value accessories up to high-end gaming products, and they all carry very healthy margins. If you have a showroom, one of the first steps to take is to stock a good range of accessories to cater for your market and ensure you can supply your customers’ needs at the time of the sale.A great deal of these sales opportunities are impulse-buys and it is so much easier to sell a product if you have it in stock and can show it to your customer. If you don’t have a showroom, a great idea is to have a core list of add-on products to sell with your mainstream products. An action list is a very simple way to ensure that your sales people realise the margin opportunities that they are missing if they don’t offer these extra accessories. Let’s take a case in point: how many PCs does your company sell without the simple add-on of a basic UPS?  And these generally carry more than a  30% margin!The consumables market in New Zealand is a very fast moving area of business, but it’s also a great way of keeping in touch with your customers. Most of the printer vendors have mid-to-high end printers that have email notification of low toner. These can be set up to send updates to your email address. What a great way to own your customers’ consumable business and also add value to them. It’s a five minute job that can add a good deal of income to your business. Stocking media and consumables is another good way to improve your return business. The amount of PCs and notebooks that go out into the market with no thought of enhancing the desktop with speakers, webcams or media keyboards is just plain scary. It may seem like insignificant numbers at the time but they soon add up.Remember, the accessories market generates sales of millions of dollars per month and consumables sales are even bigger, so make sure you get your piece of the pie!