Xerox Realigns Its Leaner Sales Force

[Anonymous]

Xerox realigns its leaner sales force
In early 2011, scores of Xerox Corp. sales managers and supervisors gathered in Las Vegas to hear Chip Heath — co-author of the best-seller Switch:
How to Change Things When Change Is Hard — talk about changing.The occasion was more than just another rah-rah “get motivated” retreat aimed at firing up the troops. It came as Xerox was embarking on a major change in how it goes about selling office equipment and services in its single largest market, the United States.

“It’s a major shift,” said Kevin Warren, president of the company’s United States Client Operations. And as such, Xerox had to start with conditioning itself about accepting change.

“You can come up with the most dynamic strategy, but if people don’t buy into it, it will fail,” Warren said.

The company earlier this year finished a year of realignment work that saw it move numerous Xerox sales accounts to Global Imaging Systems, the Florida-based office technology dealer it bought in 2007. That in turn freed up Xerox’s internal sales force to focus on big firms. Xerox’s direct sales force “was trying to be all things to all people, calling on large accounts, calling on small accounts,” Warren said.

The company also streamlined its sales operation, going from an organization of 42 geographic regions to 10, and giving more autonomy to those 10, such as hiring and travel expense decisions.

“The response has been, ‘man, this is like freedom,’ ” Warren said.

Today, the company has a direct sales force of about 1,000 people, which is “somewhat” smaller than it had been before the realignment, he said. “It’s definitely a leaner, less bureaucratic structure.”

Messing with how sales happen can be a move fraught with danger. Just ask Xerox. CEO G. Richard Thoman was let go in 2000 after only a year in the top job, in part because of a failed reorganization of the company’s sales team.

But the current shift comes as a soft economy has clients less interested in the latest in printing technology, which had been Xerox’s sweet spot, and more interested in services that cut their costs or improve their operations.

“The technology used to be the lead actor, now it’s more the supporting actor,” Warren said.

That’s increasingly the case for Xerox companywide, not just in its office business.
In 2011, services — such as business process outsourcing and document management — generated more revenues than the selling, servicing and supplying of equipment.

Information technology research firm IDC in a note late last year called the restructuring “timely and necessary.” Global Imaging Systems, which Xerox bought for $1.5 billion, has traditionally been strong in the small- and mid-sized business market — the same area where Xerox sales generally were weak.

In states where Global Imaging does not have a presence, Xerox is using resellers as its sales force. But Global Imaging’s footprint continually is spreading as it snaps up small, regional office equipment and managed print service firms, such as RK Dixon in Iowa earlier this year and firms in Iowa, Florida and Virginia in 2011.

Last year also saw Global Imaging purchase Xerographic Solutions, a Rochester-based Xerox reseller.The realignment was done in two waves, in July and then January.“The early indications are it’s really beginning to yield results,” Warren said. “We like what we’re seeing.”

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April 17, 2012 at 7:50 AM