Want an Award: Send a Check

If you are a manager and have attended any event using your e-mail address and title you probably found yourself on a SPAM e-mail list. If that be the case I am sure you have been notified of the great honor of being nominated for the Who’s Who of (prestigious name). I remember the first time I received this exciting e-mail: I quickly clicked through to complete my biographical information for the listing, and just as quickly discovered the $50 “listing fee.” Wow, I looked around to make certain nobody saw me click through to what was now obviously a scam. I didn’t want to look foolish.

How many people do you think actually complete that information and pay the $50? I’ll admit, I’ve read of that great honor bestowed on numerous individuals I have seen speaking at events. When I read the notation in their biography I immediately lose a level of respect for the person before I even listen to them speak. Are they so insecure that they think paying $50 for an “award” provides them with credibility?

It isn’t difficult to understand the scam: Send out 1,000 e-mails per day, have 20 managers actually pay the listing fee and you earn a cool $1,000 per day. Over a 240 day business year you earn $240,000 and the required investment to set-up this business? A slick looking website ($2,000), an e-mail distribution account ($200), and a list of managers ($5000). For a small investment of $7,200 these scammers collect $240,000 per year. Maybe they should buy twice as many e-mail addresses!

There have been numerous opportunities in the imaging business to buy an award. Now there is one more—for a mere $900 per month you can be named one of the top 100 service dealers in the country, or is it the world? For those predisposed to taking other’s money without providing tangible value it is a great….shall we say scheme, in that 100 companies paying $900 per month is an astonishing $1,080,000 per year, without doing a stitch of work other then selling these unsuspecting business people on the value of the award. You might even sell some of the “top 100” companies some consulting services: Imagine you get some of those “top 100” to pay you a fee to come in and train their sales force on how to market the recently acquired designation! Cha-Ching.

How could you possibly designate a company as top in anything without reviewing the entire pool of candidates? If you wanted to determine the top 100 universities wouldn’t you need to evaluate all qualified universities against a clearly defined set of criteria? Doesn’t the company certifying the top 100 universities need to be independent? If that certifying company was paid only by the universities that earned a spot on the top 100 list would there be any credibility in the list?

You could be a top 100 service company; you could be a Who’s Who, you could “earn” a degree from an unaccredited diploma mill “university,” but wouldn’t you rather spend your hard earned dollars on some marketing that will truly bring you respect? Over the last 25 years I have witnessed the imaging industry transform from the Wild West into a group of highly professional business operators. There is no need to resurrect the evils of the past with paid for awards.

What I have learned is that some dealerships are thirsting for a reputable industry player to certify that they have a quality customer service organization. Clearly service, including back office operations, is a determinant in selecting a vendor. As the only industry player with experience in all aspects of a dealership operation I take it as a challenge to support this need.

You can bet SD will never take your money with any type of scheme that can pretend to designate you as one of the top 100 organizations in the industry, since it would be impractical to think we can evaluate every dealership (and what if two dealerships in the same market were both stellar…is there any legitimacy in saying one is top 100 because they paid us first when the other might actually be superior) but we certainly have the skill set to know what good looks like. Look for an announcement in the not too distant future on how we’ll quench that thirst with legitimacy.