An Analyst emailed this to me as a .pdf asking me if I knew where this came from or if I wrote it (dam, I always get the blame). Has anyone seen this anywhere, and if so please tell! (Note from Art)
"In a move started by legacy IKON executive Matt Espe and continued by his seeming heir apparent Jeff Hickling, Ricoh is eliminating their industry leading training division known as Ricoh University. As of September i". all of the sales and service training duties will fall back to business units to manage as
part of their integrated profit and loss.
It may seem strange to dismantle a business division that has produced some of the best trained sales and service professionals in the industry, as attested to by research and awards from CompTIA, the Professional Society of Sales and Marketing Training (www.smt.org) and InfoTrends in the past few years, but it is another clear indication that Ricoh is now firmly in the hands of the short sighted, short term profit mentality that brought IKON to its knees and made it a target for acquisition.
Ricoh will be losing the top training talent that piloted the success of their training initiatives, since job cuts throughout the organization a re also a big part of the "cut expenses to seem profitable" theory of IKON management. Ricoh will revert to the IKON standard box-selling and sub-standard service mentality within 18 months based on the expected increase in turnover as the quality of training degrades quickly without sufficient oversight. For example, Ricoh University leader Beverley Patterson has been cut effective August so". ironically she will leave the company about 2 weeks after traveling to San Antonio to accept an industry award from CompTIA at their Breakaway conference for leading Ricoh University.
Meanwhile, Ricoh competitors like Canon and Toshiba are actually investing in training and sales productivity tools to strengthen their solution selling capabilities and prepare staff for the slow, steady rebound of business expected in the next quarters. Toshiba's recent investment into Sales Optimizer, a SAAS training tool that works within Salesforce.com has begun showing real results.
It should be interesting to watch the results of the IKON/Ricoh merger, as it seems rather than taking the best of both companies and creating an organization of strengths, they are allowing failed policies of the past to infect the healthy parts of the business.
Seems like someone does not like Ricoh!(Note from Art)
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