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ENGAGEMENT
Since he joined Toshiba as Head
of Channel six years ago, Carl Day
has used education and personal
development for competitive
advantage, as a means of
differentiating Toshiba from larger,
better resourced competitors – at least
as far as the channel is concerned.
“When I came to Toshiba I thought
I can’t take on the Canons, Ricohs and
Xeroxs by trying to beat them at their
own game. Those brands had greater
recognition in the industry; were much
more established; and had a much bigger
marketplace. I didn’t have the financial
resources to take any of that away, so we
adopted a very different approach and
focused on education programmes to help
our dealers grow,” he explained.
One of Day’s first actions was to
introduce a management training
programme for the channel, which involved
three days of training with the Royal
Marines where participants learnt the value
of contingency planning and other military
skills that could be applied in the world of
business.
The success of that initiative
strengthened Day’s conviction that sales
engagement in the print industry could be
enhanced by education – a belief that four
years later led to the establishment of the
Toshiba Masters programme implemented
in conjunction with training company
Consalia and Middlesex University.
The first cohort of Toshiba dealers to
go through that programme, Day among
them, has just completed the course and
submitted their final dissertations. Their
experience supports Day’s belief in the
value of education and the benefits of
exploring new ways of thinking.
“From a business perspective the
results have been spectacular,” he said.
“We have been measuring the sales
performance of dealers on the Masters
PrintIT Reseller
talks to Carl Day about Toshiba’s new approach
to customer engagement
Education,
education,
education
goals, whether through being a partner
with Toshiba, you can achieve your goals
via a set of objectives and actions that are
measurable, relevant and transparent.”
Day says that the advantage of
the JGOA approach is that it is cyclical
rather than linear and that by constantly
reinventing itself and generating new
ideas it overcomes people’s resistance to
familiar sales techniques. For this reason,
he believes the methodology will also be
very effective at helping Toshiba dealers
win new business.
“More than 95% of the companies
that make up the channel are started
by successful sales people,” explained
Day. “By their nature, they are very
sales-focused. They approach business
generation and client engagement in a very
similar way, using a linear methodology
based on identifying a problem and
handholding a customer to a solution.”
Because most sales training is passed
down from an experienced sales person to
a junior sales person, Day says that dealers
are being taught techniques that might
have been successful 20 or 30 years ago,
but are no longer effective today.
“One of the metrics that always shocks
me is the number of phone calls in our
industry that have to be made to get one
appointment. Depending on who you listen
to, you are looking at several 100 phone calls
to get just one appointment. Yet, everyone
has a requirement for print. This must mean
that sales people are not engaging the client
in the right way,” he said.
Building trust
To find out where sales people were going
wrong, Day commissioned a Professor
at Loughborough University to analyse
sales calls and identify which words
and behaviours generated a positive or
negative response. From a tranche of 200
calls – none of which resulted in a sale
When I came
to Toshiba I
thought I can’t
take on the
Canons, Ricohs
and Xeroxs by
trying to beat
them at their
own game
and over the last 12 months they have
outperformed our other dealers, with
a 75% increase in dealer unit sales
compared to a 35% increase among non-
Masters dealers.
“The Masters degree has created an
energy and a desire to change. That was
always the intention – if nothing else, we
wanted people to change the way they
approach their business, change the way
they think. That was the primary objective
of the programme.”
B2B engagement
Day is already using what he has learnt to
transform the way Toshiba engages with
the channel and, hopefully, the way Toshiba
dealers engage with their customers, via
a new B2B engagement model, the Joint
Goals Actions and Objectives (JGOA)
plan, which he introduced to Toshiba
channel partners at the company’s dealer
conference in November.
“JGOA is a B2B engagement model
with a different approach. I don’t walk in
and say ‘I can save you money’; I don’t
walk in and say ‘I work for Toshiba and we
are the best’. Instead, I say ‘What are your
1, 3 and 5 year goals?’ That’s all I want to
know. The JGOA process I’ve designed will
show whether I can help you achieve those
Carl Day
TOSHIBA:
Customer Engagement
