End-of-quarter sales pain, robots, Epson, remote surgery, drones and Eddie Van Halen.
Pretty much a normal Friday on Ask Us Anything.
Art Post and I started with something every salesperson recognizes: a deal you did everything right on can still get pulled upstairs to corporate and disappear into somebody else’s purchasing process.
Since 2012, I've posted this video on DOTC and whatever platform de jour -
It was the song, written for America well before 911, it was the Super Bowl, it was the people, it was the time, and it was the flag on the inside of his jacket.
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Not the least of these challenges is the daunting task of integrating two businesses’ systems into a single management point of truth, efficiency, and execution. But there are other obstacles along the way that even the most discerning business executive may overlook.
In January 1926, independent typewriter dealers met in Kansas City and formed the National Association of Typewriter Dealers. Annual dues cost $10.
A dealer in that room sold machines with keys, ribbons, platens, gears, and a carriage moving across the page. His customers needed those machines to run their offices, and his business depended on knowing how to sell them, finance them, repair them, and keep them working.
BTA returns to Kansas City in 2026 for its centennial.
Ray recently reviewed the Business Technology Association’s Form 990 and raised concerns about the amount of money the association holds in reserve.
The figures may be accurate. The argument built around them belongs to Ray.
My first reaction was simpler: Why now?
Become a member. Attend the meetings. Submit a proposal. Work with the committees. Convince other members that a different direction is needed.
The BTA is celebrating its 100th anniversary. The organization has more attention around it than usual, and Ray has found a public filing that gives him a timely subject for the big Sharp board.
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In the “olden days,” we walked into an account knowing more than the prospect. We knew the speeds and feeds, the lease ex-dates, the service costs, and the components of the monthly payment.
All the buyer knew was that the old device jammed Friday afternoon, the invoice “never matched” the quote, and the office manager had stopped believing the service promise sometime around the third callback.
That conversation has evolved, especially in this new AI/LLM world.
I wonder how many prospects are using AI now, and how much that changes the sale.
The copier business was still built around equipment, territories, quotas, leases, service contracts, and the belief that the salesperson controlled the information. Customers needed us to explain speeds, feeds, finishing options, duty cycles, and cost per page. We carried brochures, made demonstrations, and waited outside offices hoping someone would give us twenty minutes.
Not someday. Now.
Offices, schools, healthcare facilities, restaurants, hotels, campuses, light warehousing operations, and service-heavy customer environments are all looking for ways to reduce repetitive movement, improve workflow, and protect staff from work that drains time without adding much judgment.
That creates a real opening for the dealer channel. But there is a catch.
A robot sale does not begin with a product lecture. It begins with an appointment.
Marco Technologies is building the kind of platform the office technology channel has seen before.
The comparison to IKON is not exact. IKON was larger, public, multi-vendor, and eventually acquired by Ricoh. Marco is privately held under Norwest Equity Partners ownership and operates as a broad business technology provider across print, managed IT, security, voice, video, document management, and managed services.
The comparison still deserves attention.
Over the last decade, Marco has followed a recognizable path: private-equity backing, acquisition-led expansion, regional stitching, broader technology services, national account capability, and now centralized logistics infrastructure designed to support customers across the United States.
That is the platform-dealer model.
Office-ready robots are entering the channel. The dealers who learn the service model early get the better shot.
It wasn’t our first rodeo. It was our second.
The May 13 webinar with Keith Garrett from Pudu Robotics, Greg Walters with The Continuum hosted by the lovely Queen of the Webinar, Patricia Ames of The Imaging Channel, gave copier dealers a clearer view of where office-ready robots fit inside the channel.
Companies are spending heavily on Ai, then jamming it into the same old bureaucracy.
Why would one imprison an LLM/Ai inside a spreadsheet?
That is the trap.
The first wave of enterprise Ai is already taking a familiar shape: sales agents, marketing agents, finance agents, legal agents, HR agents, manager agents.
They are creating Ai in their own image: failure
By Celeste Dame | Celestial Sales Singularity
Xerox beside Aston Martin Aramco Formula One makes for an easy photograph. Racing green. Carbon fiber. Clean lighting. Expensive shoes on polished floors. The kind of place where nobody admits they once jammed a copier by feeding letterhead upside down.
Still, the partnership deserves more than a quick eye roll from the copier channel.
There is something useful happening under the shine.
Xerox is trying to change the room it gets invited into.
That sounds simple until you remember how long a name can drag its own history behind it. Xerox is one of the rare brands that escaped the product category and became common language. That kind of fame helped build the company, but fame ages strangely. It hardens. It turns into a museum tag if nobody refreshes the meaning behind it.
That job began for the United States in the Mediterranean.
Xerox has the old-king problem.
A once-commanding name gave away too much authority, got stripped down by market weather, watched its kingdom fracture, and now stands in the storm asking what power remains when ceremony, size, and reputation no longer protect you. That is Lear on the heath. The crown still means something, but only after the storm reveals what was real and what was theater.
For Xerox, the “storm” is the decline of print, the stock price, activist pressure, leadership turnover, the Fujifilm break, the Icahn years, and the Lexmark integration. The old court is gone. The robe is wet. The old script no longer works.
