Gazing Helps Xerox to ‘Get on the same page

From its inception in 1906 as the Haloid Company, the Rochester, NY-based corporation has turned into a $15.8 billion leviathan, whose strategic intent is to “help people find better ways to do great work” ideally by “leading in document technologies, products and services that improve our customers' work processes and business results”.

From its original focus on manufacturing and selling photographic paper, the Corporation has broadened its product and service portfolio to embrace “innovative document solutions, services and systems -- including colour and blackand- white printers, digital presses, multifunction devices and digital copiers” all designed for offices and production-printing environments. It also offers associated supplies, software and support.

And its annual $900m+ spend on research and development has resulted in a stream of highly innovative products that have been adopted by businesses worldwide including the original computer ‘mouse’; laser printers and, more recently ‘multi-function devices’.

Xerox has constantly innovated with its distribution strategy too, which, in addition to its direct sales force, tele-web and Xerox.com, includes resellers, dealers, authorised sales agents and, unique to Europe only, a concessionaires channel, worth over $1billion a year in annual sales and comprising a network of "mini-Document Companies" that serve small and medium-sized businesses in 15 countries. This network includes more than 600 independent concessionaires with more than 3,000 sales and telesales representatives.

But Darren Cassidy, the then European manager responsible for providing sales training to these important channel partners recognised that the growing complexity of this channel/product/country mix impacted on his training efforts and they were becoming less effective over time. 

He said, “Part of Xerox’s commitment to the concessionaries was to deliver training, which we did to a consistently high standard, as the feedback forms demonstrated. But, as the training budgets were allocated on a local basis, inevitably, inefficiencies were creeping in and we were not benefiting from any economies of scale. 

Some training was done in-house, some was purchased from third parties. So we had 27 ‘versions’ of training delivered in 27 countries. New starter training varied from 7 days in classroom to 45 days. The sales training was a stand-alone process and we would have to ‘slot in’ other information as we could. And although there was a big disparity between the training given to concessionaires and the direct salesforce, they both had between 60 to 70 products to learn about, which generated a huge amount of paperwork. Finally, there was little attempt to embrace technology and other platforms such as the web or TV. 

All in all, I knew that we had to carry out a ‘root and branch’ review of our training requirements. We needed a new approach that unified the entire process and most importantly, we needed to better align the management training with the sales training”.

Darren’s next step was to search for a new training provider and to use a traditional Invitation to Tender (ITT) process for a pilot project as the means to assess their long term suitability. In all he met eighteen candidate training companies, but awarded the pilot contract – a pan-European New Starter Programme for over 1000 people - to Gazing. Why?


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