Roundtable Reality
I have spent the majority of my 33 years with Xerox working in sales and marketing with small and medium sized customers. For about eight of those years I was a sales rep and later General Manager of the Caribbean Region. The majority of my customers in the Caribbean were small businesses, a few were medium businesses and it was very rare I dealt with a customer with more than 500 employees! As a matter of fact my team in the Caribbean region itself would qualify as a medium sized business (less than 300 sales, service & administrative employees)
Needless to say it was a big eye opener when moderating the roundtable on Monday I came to learn that most of the very popular SMB bloggers (Evan Carmichael, Chris Brunner, Patrick Cook, James Gaskin, and Denise O'Berry) did not know we have an SMB oriented line of products... HELLO!!!! The alarms went off and I realized that we have some work to do!
The good news is that we have the right set of products (or at least I think we do) and we have a good set of partners (there were 800 at the event in Orlando). The bad news is that we need to listen better and we need to reach out to small and medium business owners... the message needs to get out and hopefully it will.
Orlando was a start... please stay tuned for the podcast and know I will be out there listening to anyone who cares to share their opinions. I will be a champion to make sure others inside Xerox hear what needs to be passed on from workers in small and medium sized businesses that have pain points with managing documents (paper or digital) in their businesses.
Paul Gleason
Vice President, Small and Medium Business
Xerox