Turf wars

If you think the management turf battle between IT and facilities is the big quandary in the MFD sales world, we have a bigger one for you. Granted, the sales process has to be redirected when responsibilities shift in a company, which means that new contacts for office equipment sales have to be uncovered. But if you have a field sales person that doesn't welcome the challenge of discovering new pockets of responsibility at a prospect's company, you may have an order-taker instead of a sales representative.

Rank and file resistance

Here is a much bigger problem. People don't like change, but to get the extraordinary productivity gains that connected shared peripherals promise, people have to change. That's what you have to deal with as a vendor, that's what your distribution partners have to deal with, and that's what we had to deal with as market researchers. The approaches we encountered ranged from companies that standardized on MFDs for the entire organization, but did not connect a single one, to companies whose IT teams came in over the weekend and unplugged all of the desktop printers. Most are somewhere in between.

• Office-Based MFDs Press Release

• Office-Based MFDs Graph: Top MFD Advantages

• Office-Based MFDs brochure

• Table of Contents and List of Figures