I lead marketing at an office equipment dealer. If you asked me five years ago what that meant, I would have told you the job centered on brand awareness, content creation, managing lead flow, and supporting sales with collateral.
That job description is gone.
The job now includes revenue operations, sales enablement, and the complex leadership required for AI adoption. We are operating in a market where buyers self-educate longer and engage sales later, arriving with sharper questions that expose any gap in our internal communication.
But there is a second, more volatile force compressing our timeline: the speed of technological change. As JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently noted, we cannot view this AI revolution as a slow roll-out. He warned that unlike previous shifts, “it’s not going to roll out over 20 years … it’s more parabolic.” He compares the magnitude of this shift to the internet or electricity, emphasizing that because the change is massive and fast, “if you put your head in the sand you will lose.”
In this environment, when sales and marketing disagree on definitions, the CRM stays optimistic until finance closes the month. We can’t afford that anymore. Alignment now means marketing leads buyer education and responsible AI adoption, while sales leadership enforces usage inside the sales motion.
Why alignment breaks (and why it costs more now)
Our industry suffers from unique complexity. We run multiple lines of business, such as print, managed IT, telecom, security, and software, often under one brand. We sell to multiple buyer roles, from the office manager to the IT director.
The symptoms of misalignment are familiar to every executive reading this. Sales complains lead quality is weak. Marketing complains follow-up discipline is weak. Leadership sees high activity levels, yet the revenue doesn’t match the story. The business impact is brutal: margin pressure from early discounting, proposals stalling after demos, and lower attach rates for managed services.
Alignment is not a meeting cadence. Alignment is an operating system.
A real friction story: everyone was right, and we still lost
Let me take you into a weekly pipeline meeting from a few years ago. The agenda was standard: lead quality and next steps. The friction, however, was palpable.
Sales leadership argued, “These leads waste time.” Marketing countered, “Half of these leads never got a first call”.
We stopped arguing opinions and pulled three simple facts onto the screen: time to first touch, number of touches before a lead was marked “dead,” and the meeting-held rate by rep. What we found was that we had no shared definition of “qualified,” no standard for response time, and no closed-loop feedback returning to marketing.
We realized we didn’t need better leads; we needed standards. AI doesn’t replace this hard conversation; it just reduces the time required to gather the facts.
The alignment operating system
To fix this, we moved to one revenue team with one language and one scoreboard. We created written definitions for “ideal customer profile” and “qualified meeting,” which sales leadership accepted.
Marketing took ownership of the reporting that connects activity to pipeline movement. Sales took ownership of discovery quality and providing field feedback on competitor claims. Executive leadership took ownership of the only thing that matters: enforcement.
Once we built a shared scoreboard — tracking meeting-held rates, stage-to-stage conversion, and attach rates — behavior changed fast.
But the engine behind this alignment is buyer education. Prospects arrive either educated or misinformed; as a dealer, you choose which one becomes normal. We stopped creating generic brochures and built a buyer-questions library tied to the sales motion. We answered the questions sales reps hate answering repeatedly: lease versus purchase, the real drivers of cost-per-page, and why managed print agreements fail.
We built comparisons for A3 versus A4 fleets and plain-language guides on the in-house IT versus MSP model. When marketing teaches the buyer, and sales reinforces that teaching with required pre-meeting content, the conversation shifts. We stop debating basic facts and start negotiating value.
AI as the new baseline: the “agent” workforce is coming
This is where the new reality of AI crashes into our traditional dealership model. AI has lowered the cost of first drafts, moving the scarce resource to direction and review. But it goes beyond just writing emails. We are moving toward agentic AI — systems that can execute multistep workflows.
If you think this is science fiction, look at McKinsey, which is currently rewriting its own operating model. A little over a year and a half ago, McKinsey had 3,000 active AI agents alongside its 40,000 human workers. Today it has 20,000 agents. Leadership originally predicted it would take until 2030 to reach a ratio of one agent per human. Now? They believe they will be there in 18 months.
This explosion of digital workers is happening now. As a dealer, you have two choices: ignore it and let your competitors leverage it or build the “operating system” to manage it.
Leading the navigation
As business leaders in office technology, we are at a critical point and a massive opportunity: Are we going to lead our customers in the navigation of AI, or are we going to watch from the sidelines?
We have a choice to make regarding whether we build AI or buy and resell it. At my dealership we’ve decided to embrace and continue to immerse ourselves in AI. Our strategy is a three-step waterfall:
1. Support ourselves: We build tools that we use first to our own advantage — fixing our own alignment, speed, and responsiveness.
2. Support customers: Once proven internally, we sell these solutions to our customers, helping them navigate the same complexity.
3. Support the industry: Finally, we will provide these tools to others in this industry to license to their own customers.
We are thinking first about how to support us, then the customer, and finally the industry.
Tool categories leaders should understand
To execute this, leaders need to understand that we aren’t just using ChatGPT. We are deploying specific categories of tools mapped to outcomes.
• LLM workspaces: We use these for drafting, summarization, and turning raw notes into structured narratives.
• Custom assistants: We build specific assistants for repeat work. For example, a sales enablement assistant helps draft objection talk tracks, while a proposal assistant generates executive summaries from discovery notes, ensuring consistent scope language.
• Agentic AI: This is the next frontier. These are agents that run multistep work with review checkpoints, such as meeting prep research or onboarding drills.
Managing machines: The new leadership skill
To reach the next frontier, we have to master “managing machines” today. Our longevity is tied to improving these agents over time.
We focus on specific prompting fundamentals: Role, Context, Constraints, and Output Format. We run a weekly training cadence where we review a workflow, showing the “before and after” of AI usage.
But we also must manage the risks. As JPMorgan Chase’s Dimon pointed out, while AI handles tasks like risk, fraud, and marketing, “agents … could change your business … [and] the speed of which things happen.” If we aren’t careful, AI scales mistakes fast.
This requires a clear partnership with IT. IT owns the security: data classification, access controls, and vendor governance. But marketing must own the governance of the output: brand voice rules, claim standards, and the review process. We also have to manage the internal fear. We name the risks without drama and publish clear rules on “safe use” versus “unsafe use.”
As Dimon says, “We’re going to deploy it … will it eliminate jobs? Yes. Will it change jobs? Yes … you’re going to get the world you got.”
The growth angle: helping SMBs who are lost
Here is the opportunity. Most of our SMB customers want productivity gains but lack a plan. Who better to lead them than their office equipment dealer? We already sit inside their workflows. We already support their business-critical systems.
We can now offer AI readiness workshops, role-based prompting training, and “starter agent packs” for their intake or follow-up processes. Internal alignment becomes a customer-facing capability.
A 90-day plan to sponsor without a reorg
You don’t need a massive restructure to start.
• Days 1-15: Write your qualified definitions and stage exit rules. Pick one sales motion to standardize.
• Days 16-45: Publish your first set of buyer-education pieces and train sales managers to inspect usage.
• Days 46-90: Deploy two agents with approval gates — one for sales enablement and one for marketing production. Publish your governance rules. Sales and marketing alignment in office equipment is still the job. AI is simply the new operating system. Marketing leadership sets the rules, teaches the team, and protects the brand.
Keven Ellison
Keven Ellison is Vice President of Marketing at AIS, where he leads brand strategy, customer engagement, and marketing transformation for a technology provider serving businesses in Las Vegas and Southern California. With more than 30 years of marketing leadership, his experience spans technology, financial services, communications, biotech, and lead generation. At AIS, he is also responsible for company-wide AI adoption, guiding strategy and execution as the organization expands its AI and app development capabilities.