John Mahoney of MaconPOS won a competitive ticketing and POS project with the Georgia National Fair by taking a consultative sales approach and creating extra value for the customer. Specifically, Mahoney listened to understand the customer's needs, created multiple proposal scenarios, and suggested using the POS solution capabilities to generate advertising revenue. This consultative sale approach, along with delivering a reliable solution, has led to a new market opportunity in fairs and entertainment venues for MaconPOS.

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“That consultative, creative sale — that’s where
my competitors go wrong. They say, ‘Here is our
solution; it’s my way or the highway,’” says John
Mahoney, president of MaconPOS.

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bar code printing ❚❚❚❚ point of sale technologies
Bring Extra Value To Your
POS Sales
This point of sale (POS) VAR uses consultative sales and creative value-adds to land
POS sales in a competitive vertical market.
By Gennifer Biggs
F
or some POS resellers, the opportunity to create additional value and differ-
entiate themselves to customers can be difficult to find. That is especially true
if they have honed their line card to include what they consider best-of-breed
components and sell a fairly standardized solution. For MaconPOS, the
chance to stand out from a crowd means taking the time to practice consultative selling rather than
presenting its solution set as a take-it-or-leave-it offering.
This POS VAR recently took that opportunity to a new level, working against 10 competitors to win a ticketing
and POS project with the Georgia National Fair and creating its own opportunity to sell a solution to fairs and
other entertainment venues around the country. That opportunity started with a conversation to determine if
MaconPOS had the right collection of POS products to create a simple but effective solution for the fair, says Pres-
ident of MaconPOS John Mahoney.
Invest Time In Consultative POS Sales
MaconPOS was included in the search by Georgia National Fair CTO James MaconPOS
Tingerthal after he saw a telephone book yellow pages ad featuring Macon-
POS solutions. “He had reached out to various ticketing VARs already, but then 2009 sales revenue: $1 million
saw our ad and gave me a call to ask if we could handle their problem,”
explains Mahoney. The national fair, which handles ticketing at its entry gates, 2009 sales growth rate: 100%
needed to vault well beyond its legacy Royal cash registers (the fair didn’t take
credit cards) and expensive preprinted card stock tickets and was vetting POS 2010 projected sales revenue:
solutions. “The first visit, I didn’t even take out my laptop; I just listened and $25 million
then went home and put together a variety of scenarios for them,” says
(478) 538-8311
Mahoney. He created a proposal that outlined different ticketing options, the
details for using a secondary monitor in each ticket booth for customer-facing
advertising, and the list of reasons to have a printer that can handle ticket www.maconpos.com
Photos by Pete Winkel
printing on location. “That consultative, creative sale — that’s where my com-
petitors go wrong. They say, ‘Here is our solution; it’s my way or the high- Vendors: CognitiveTPG, Datalogic, HP
way.’”
In particular, Mahoney took into account that all-in-one systems might not be
Distributor: BlueStar
the right fit for the small ticketing booths at the fair, which were also quite a
BSMinfo.com August 2010 49

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bar code printing ❚❚❚❚ point of sale technologies
distance from any IT support. After listening to the cus- ly what each ticket booth is doing on a netbook. From
tomer’s concerns about uptime, Mahoney felt a decentral- there, Mahoney added CognitiveTPG printers that fit easi-
ized solution was a better choice; otherwise, if a server ly into the small space of the small ticket booths and could
failed, all the ticket booths would be disabled. His solution print tickets as fast as the booth personnel could sell them.
included HP 3000 components that are all independently While Mahoney’s price — $178,000 for 32 installations —
swappable, and each ticket booth POS solution is loaded wasn’t the highest or lowest, the Georgia National Fair
with the POSperfect software, which maintains a mission- selected MaconPOS after several demonstrations and con-
critical database on each terminal, decoupling its POS versations with Mahoney.
functions from the servers. Additionally, the POS solution
can be tracked remotely, so ticket booth managers running Revenue-Generating Value-Adds Serve
around the fairground in golf carts can still monitor exact- As Differentiator In Crowded POS Space
To further set himself apart from his competition, Mahoney
If Customer Measures ROI By Speed, suggested two revenue-generating ideas as part of his pro-
posal. First, by adding a secondary monitor to each ticket
Reliable POS Components Are A Must-Have booth’s POS terminal and then facing that monitor toward
the customers in line at the fair ticket booths, the fair could
When MaconPOS, a point of sale (POS) ers were installed at the Georgia Fair tick- sell digital advertising space to sponsors. MaconPOS also
VAR in Georgia, landed a ticketing project et booths, they delivered. In one hour, the suggested that, because of the unique capabilities of the
with the Georgia National Fair, it knew printers handled tickets for 6,283 people printer selected, the tickets (printed in real time at each
that a reliable, fast printer was a must- coming through 29 gates, printing 2,537 ticket booth) could feature the logo of
have to meet the objectives of the cus- tickets in those 60 minutes. On average, the fair and the appropriate entrance
tomer. Rather than measuring ROI in terms the printers handled 42 transactions per data, but also a one-color advertise-
of investment and return, the fair mea- minute, or 1.5 transactions per minute ment, opening another potential rev-
sured success in terms of how many visi- each. During the fair, the fair’s ticket enue stream for the fair. Just like the
tors it could process through 29 ticket lines booths burnt through 25 miles of register rotating ads on the secondary moni-
during its 10-day run. That meant, in par- paper without one hitch. tors, the ads appearing on the tickets
ticular, a ticket printing solution that could In addition, the printers ship with Cogni- can be programmed to change each
tiveTPG Receiptware marketing software, day. The fair can even rotate self-
which allows Mahoney to configure the promotional language about upcom- MaconPos differen-
tiates itself by using
printers to produce tickets with a Georgia ing concerts at the event on the tick- the capabilities of
Fair logo on them, but also to print adver- ets. “No only did the use of this par- its ticketing solu-
tisements that can be rotated out each ticular printer allow us to offer a tion components to
day. “We configured each printer to print way for the fair to offset the cost of offer extra value
tickets with the ticket information, the fair the solution with advertising, it also to customers.
logo, and advertising images that will saved the fair a tremendous amount of money on the
eventually help offset the cost of this entire preprinted card stock tickets they were still going to use
investment,” explains Mahoney. with the other solutions,” says Mahoney.
The small size and Mahoney credits the patience and detail- During this inaugural year with the new system, the fair
reliability of the A799 oriented attitude of the CognitiveTPG sup- didn’t sell either advertising space, but rather included the
printer from CognitiveTPG
make it a perfect fit for the port staff with successfully delivering on spots on ticket receipts and the secondary monitor as part
fair ticketing solution the marketing aspect of the POS solution. of its vendor sponsorship package. For example, advertis-
developed by MaconPOS. “Their support group is exceptional. They ers such as the soda brands sold at the fair could choose
were a working partner rather than a cold, to include in its sponsorship of the fair a daylong spot on
keep up with thousands of guests a day. big, glass box vendor,” says Mahoney. In the outward-facing monitors, and MaconPOS loaded sev-
John Mahoney, president of MaconPOS, particular, the printer vendor supported eral different advertising promotions to rotate throughout
called on one of his favorite products, a configuring the printers to deliver the high- the fair’s run. Mahoney loaded those images and config-
small (5.6 in. x 7.25 in.) printer from est quality graphics possible. “The Cogni- ured the displays and receipts to feature changing ads as a
CognitiveTPG, the A799. This POS printer, tiveTPG team worked overtime hours to value-add for the fair.
which offers monochrome printing on ther- help us, tweaking the logo contrast and
mal paper, is built to work in the rough- the image to get it clean and crisp,” says Experience With Vertical POS Sale Can Fuel Growth
and-tumble environment of POS and to Mahoney. “Plus, they patiently answered For the customer, the MaconPOS solution offered clear
deliver both reliability and speed. repeated questions from me. They are benefits, including opportunities to recapture the cost of
Mahoney has deployed these printers for truly an example of what a vendor should the deployment with advertising, nearly no downtime on a
several years, calling them speed demons be.” decentralized solution, and the capacity to handle ticket
that just never quit. Once the A799 print- www.cognitivetpg.com lines fast and efficiently — the solution handles on aver-
50 August 2010 BSMinfo.com

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“We have already been recommended to the fair in Texas
by the Georgia fair, and we are planning a trip to pitch
our ticketing solution to a chain of water parks in
Arizona and Southern California.”
John Mahoney, MaconPOS
age 42 transactions per minute or
1.5 transactions per minute on 29
registers. But MaconPOS is also
reaping the benefits of this creative
ticketing solution. “We have already
been recommended to the fair in
Texas by the
MoreInfo For an
alternative view on POS Georgia fair, and
sales techniques, go to we are planning
http://tinyurl.com/273dtoe. a trip to pitch
our ticketing solution to a chain of
water parks in Arizona and Southern
California,” explains Mahoney. “The
best part is that, to us, there wasn’t
a lot of development — the compo-
nents were already there. It was
more a matter of listening to what
this particular customer needed,
putting it together for them, and
then making little tweaks that made
it do exactly the task for which it
was needed.”
By looking at each of the compo-
nents in a slightly different light — a
fair ticket booth versus a conve-
nience store checkout — MaconPOS
has found itself facing a wide-open
new market. Mahoney says while
the impact is yet to be seen in terms
of dollars, he expects to roll this
solution out to 100 new customers
during the next year, adding millions
to his profits. The reason, he says,
he can scale so quickly is that with
the solid example of the Georgia
National Fair behind him, he has not
only metrics but the experience to
easily resolve similar POS and print-
ing issues for large event venues.
Since the International Association
of Fairs and Expositions put the
number of fairs held annually in
North America at 3,200 and the
International Association of Amuse-
ment Parks and Attractions has 4,000
members, the opportunity for
tremendous growth is clear. ●
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