Gazing Helps Xerox to ‘Get on the same page

According to John Esposito, who helped design the course, “having a clear understanding about these stages and the practical detail of how to ‘move’ the buyer through them provides the seller with a powerful and practical tool that can guide thought and action in the interactive setting.

Essentially, it means the seller can think clearly under pressure, being able to listen to the customer, all the while knowing what to say and when to say it to progress the sale”.

Crucially for Xerox, Gazing’s programme addressed two specific issues. Firstly, it provides an underlying structure or platform that underpins all the training courses, be they for new employees or experienced sales managers, and then integrates them into a coherent whole.

Secondly, the Strategic Selling Programme focuses exclusively on the interaction between the customer and the sales person. This was of critical interest to Xerox, whose new business strategy increasingly puts the customer at the centre of everything they do.

This integration process extended to the ‘Management Programmes’, which helped align all management training with the sales process, to the extent that senior Xerox management have now adopted much of Gazing’s ‘terminology’ when holding internal meetings.

Steve Hill also saw this course as helping Xerox senior management to better align the process of managing the business, with the people working within it. He said, “Gazing’s management course ensures that managers don’t lose sight of the fact that they must manage people as humans or individuals, as well as execute the plan and deliver the numbers. It creates greater transparency for everyone involved”. 

By 2004, the whole of the UK direct sales force will have undergone some Gazing training as well as all its sales management and 50% of the concessionaire’s management teams.

All the European senior management in its largest markets have also taken part. The company also played an important
part in helping the Corporation in the US to roll out a major new product suite in 2003.

Has Gazing fulfilled Darren Cassidy’s original ambition to make his training more effective, and if so, how?

Feedback from the delegates has been consistently positive with the maps appearing a clear winner. Pietro Vischi, the Xerox sales trainer responsible for the Office business division and Concessionaires in Italy believes the training allows delegates “to directly apply the methods learnt to sales situations because it’s so easy to recall. So much training is conducted but not applied, that is, it does not change behaviour. Gazing’s does”.

Steve Hill, also thinks that the Gazing training courses have achieved an important objective for him “because it is so adaptable it is applicable to both new starters and experienced staff and can transcend geographic and cultural borders. It has given us for the first time, a truly pan-European approach to training”.

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