Gazing Helps Xerox

Gazing Helps Xerox to ‘Get on the same page

Making sure that the entire sales function is performing to its maximum potential represents one of the biggest challenges facing large corporations today. For that to happen, all elements of the sales process, including channel support, training and management attention must be fully ‘synchronised’. And this aim gets more difficult to achieve for larger corporations with numerous product lines, operating across wide geographical areas and selling through multiple sales channels.

The Xerox Corporation, a global brand leader employing 67,000 people worldwide, faced just this challenge and, perhaps surprisingly, turned to a twelve-man training company in Richmond, Surrey to help them resolve it. The result has been a truly astonishing feat that has not only reduced costs and increased sales, but also effected a change in internal culture and restrengthened relationships with a $1billion distribution channel.

The company in question, Gazing Performance Ltd, has worked with the Xerox European sales management team since 1998 and has helped them achieve the ‘holy grail’ that has eluded so many large corporates, how to create a sales training programme that can embrace every individual involved in the sales process, from the new starter to the distributors’ management team; how to ‘educate’ the company’s senior management so they better support the sales process and how to ensure that the focus of everyone’s attention remains resolutely on the customer.

Gazing’s ‘scalability’ has been truly impressive too. Since the original pilot project – training over 1000 new starters – the company has trained over 20,000 staff from both Xerox and its channel partners.

According to John Esposito, the Gazing director responsible for winning the original project, one of the biggest challenges faced was persuading Xerox that the Gazing team could add value to an organisation that already had a global reputation for the quality and standard of its training programmes!

He said, “We were aware that the delegates who attended Xerox’s existing training courses regularly awarded the company satisfaction ratings of over 90%. The question then was “how can you beat that?” To us, the answer was not to ‘beat’ the existing scores, but to create a more ‘joined up’ approach to something that had become incredibly disjointed and un-focused”.

Steve Hill, the European Training Manager for Xerox Europe takes up the story. He said: “We were aware
that we no longer had a ‘line of sight’ from the training to the business. It’s easy to fall into a ‘tick box’ mentality regarding training. We needed to rediscover where each person was in terms of development and skills acquisition and then get them all connected.

We were lacking a ‘tag element’ that would re-create those connections”.

This disjointed approach to sales training is not unique to Xerox but is one of the by-products of multinational organisational structures that acquire companies (in Xerox’s case, the Tektronix Inc.’s Colour Printing and Imaging Division), move into new geographic territories and develop multiple channels to market.