enx magazine

Sometimes I long for the simpler times. Remember? A sales repre-sentative would talk to a prospect about monthly copy volume and the prospect would actually know what the rep was talking about. Simple and to the point.

Unfortunately, we’ve moved on. To quote Bob Dylan (also from a simpler time), “The times they are a’changin.” Now, we find ourselves involved in all aspects of document imaging within each of our accounts. We’ve moved beyond monthly copy volume to something called a “workflow analysis.” What is a workflow analysis, exactly? Ask five imaging system vendors (and, what’s an imaging system?) and you’ll get at least five different answers. We migrated to a new level of confusion. Here’s what happened.

• Initially, both the sales rep and the prospect understood the issues.

• Next, the sales rep understood the issues, but the prospect did not. Remember fax?

• As the sale became more complex, the prospect knew more than the sales rep – consider the early days of selling printers to the IT manager.

Currently, I suspect that neither the sales rep nor the prospect under-stand the issues. But, the problem here is that both parties think they do. Why? Because they don’t understand one another. But, you ask, aren’t they speaking the same language? Technically, yes. But, they have assigned different meanings to the same words. To put it another way, they are speaking the same language in that they recognize the words but they have assigned different meanings to them. Here are but a few examples. How would you define these terms?

* Asset Consolidation

* Asset Management

* Business Color

* Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

* Device Management

* Digital Restriction Management (DRM)

For the Want Of A Common Language pg1 pg2 pg3 PRINT WORD DOCUMENT

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