OKIDATA RESTRUCTURES SALES GROUP

[Anonymous]

Oki Data Restructures Sales Group
Printer vendor shifts from functional to geographic model
Printer
vendor Oki Data has restructured its domestic sales organization in a
move to bring its direct sales force and channel partners
together.Though only 5 percent of Oki Data’s sales are direct, those
tend to be large enterprise customers. The reorganization emphasizes
geography rather than the functional model where solution providers
deal with channel managers and account reps report to sales management.
Now, all managers will work with both customers and the channel.”We
were siloed by function,” says Chris Froman, Oki Data’s senior vice
president of U.S. sales. “What we’ve done is formed these geographic
units, and the executive responsible for each geography is responsible
for all the solution providers and end-user managers. He’s the final
arbiter. We don’t have people running up the chain on the
solution-provider side vs. the end-user side, so we should have minimal
conflicts as a result.”The plan also calls for establishing account
executives with specific vertical-industry focuses, initially retail
where the company has gained a strong foothold.Mark McBee, vice
president of vendor management at Cleveland-based MCPc, who attended
the meeting where the changes were rolled out, welcomed the move.”I’m
assuming it will be positive, but it’s still early in the game. It
seems to be a bit more focused, and that’s not a bad thing,” McBee
says. “I didn’t have overwhelmingly big issues with the way it was, but
a lot of the names and faces will be the same, just repositioned in
customer-facing roles.”One concern McBee has is that he doesn’t know
who he’ll be working with on a day-to-day basis.”The direct channel
account manager we worked with on a daily basis will be a more
customer-facing person working with our sales rep, which is a positive
thing, but still day-to-day blocking and tackling from a
channel-management standpoint is a position that has to be filled,”
McBee says. “So the [question] is, who’s going to be taking his
place?”Froman, who has experience revamping sales models at both IBM
and Lexmark, believes this restructuring will better position Oki Data
for growth, which last year was 16 percent overall.In the coming
months, Oki Data also plans to roll out managed services and
utility-based pricing models. Froman declined to elaborate.

[Author]

June 6, 2006 at 12:39 PM