5 Steps for Copier Dealers to Jumpstart Their AV Business Today

Somewhere on your service route there is a conference room with a 70-inch display, a twelve-foot HDMI cable taped to the table, and a laminated sign that says PLEASE DO NOT UNPLUG. Your tech walks past it every time the copier down the hall needs a fuser. Your rep walks past it at every lease renewal. The office manager has complained about that room to both of them, and both of them nodded politely, because neither one thought the room was theirs to sell.

That room is the whole answer to how copier dealers can sell AV, and it is also why so many dealers who try start in the wrong place. They buy a demo room, sign a distributor agreement, put a new logo on the website and wait for the phone. The phone does not ring, because nothing about the sale changed. The five steps below are rebuilt around the part everyone skips, which is the conversation.

How Copier Dealers Can Sell AV Starts With the Room You Already Walk Past

The market is not the hard part. AVIXA’s Industry Outlook and Trends Analysis, released in August 2025, projects the professional AV industry growing from $332 billion in 2025 to $402 billion in 2030, with conferencing and collaboration still the largest solution area. That largest slice is the meeting room, which is the one piece of AV your existing customers already own and already complain about. Omdia’s 2025 market landscape for collaborative meeting solutions found that only 28% of meeting rooms worldwide have any video conferencing capability at all. Put those rooms on your A-account list before you put a single display in your showroom.

The core business is not going to carry you there on its own. The Cannata Report’s 40th Annual Office Technology Dealer Survey (2025, 415 dealers) found A3 and A4 hardware and service plus managed print made up 78.9% of dealer revenue in 2024. Quocirca’s State of the Channel 2026 study found 72% of channel partners expect customer print volumes to fall over the coming year, by 7.5% on average. The job is not to replace print. It is to become the partner for more of the office before somebody else does, which is why revenueify’s work on copier dealer sales growth starts with the sales team rather than the product catalog.

The manufacturers have noticed the same numbers. Ricoh and Toshiba TEC folded MFP development and production into ETRIA, which OKI joined in October 2025, and Xerox completed its acquisition of Lexmark in July 2025. Those moves protect the manufacturers’ margins, and nobody in those boardrooms is losing sleep over your cost per copy.

So the question is not whether AV is worth selling. It is whether your team can sell it. Adding AV is not a product problem for a copier dealer. It is a conversation problem, and no partner on this list can have the conversation for you.

Step 1: Decide What Kind of AV Dealer You Are Before You Buy a Demo Room

There are three ways into AV, and they cost very different amounts. You can partner, which means you own the customer and the conversation while outside firms design, install and support the room. You can build, which means engineers, installers and programmers on your payroll. Or you can acquire, which is what Ricoh USA did when it bought Cenero, a Pennsylvania AV and managed services provider, in 2022. Most independent dealers should start as partners. The demo room is where AV divisions go to be admired, and it is a lot cheaper to skip it until you have customers who want to see one.

Then pick the accounts. Not the territory, the accounts. Pull the ten customers with the most meeting rooms and a copier renewal inside the next twelve months, and that is your first AV pipeline. You already know who approves technology spend at every one of them, which is an advantage an AV integrator walking in cold does not have.

Then decide who sells it, because you have done this once before. The same Cannata survey found 47% of surveyed dealers offer managed IT, yet managed IT was only 7.6% of dealer revenue in 2024. The lesson from that first diversification is that a new line does not sell itself because the logo is on the proposal. If you hire a dedicated AV rep, the math in our piece on sales rep ramp time applies to them too, and a zip code is still not an onboarding plan. If you are not sure which of your current reps could carry an AV conversation, find out before you decide anything else. We come back to how later in this article, because it matters more than which display you stock.

Step 2: Rent the Engineering Before You Hire It

Your first AV engineer should be somebody else’s employee. The partners from the first version of this post still hold up, with a few corrections, and they cover the parts of AV a copier dealer cannot fake.

Start with the association. The National Systems Contractors Association (NSCA) is the trade body for commercial integration, with training through its Navigate Academy and the industry’s financial benchmarks. Its Financial Analysis of the Industry 2025, drawn from 99 integration firms, reported median gross profit margins of 34.2% and recurring revenue at the largest share of integrator revenue it has ever recorded. Use those numbers to set your first AV margin targets instead of borrowing your copier ones.

Then rent the design. AV Design Labs provides outsourced drafting, engineering, control system programming and 3D renderings, which means a real build package without an engineer on your payroll. Then rent the support. CXUnify, now a Liberty AV Solutions offering sold through dealers, covers remote monitoring and remediation with CX Detect, in-room support from a phone with CX Support, and a live concierge service with CX Support+. Teleportivity and CXLogistics, named in the first version of this post, are no longer part of the CXUnify lineup.

You will need that bench from the first deal. Consensus’s 2025 Sales Engineering Compensation and Workload Report, a vendor survey of more than 600 presales professionals, found 70% of deals require presales support. Build the partner’s design fee into every AV quote from day one, so presales is a planned cost rather than a favor you owe. None of these partners sells the room for you. They make sure that when you sell it, it works.

Step 3: Your Reps Can Quote a Display. Teach Them to Sell the Meeting.

Here is the reflex you are up against. Ask a copier rep about the conference room and you will have a display quote by Thursday, with a wall mount as the upsell. That is not a character flaw. It is what the job trained them to do: find the device, match the spec, quote the lease. A conference room is not a device. It is a meeting, and the customer cares far less about the display than about the first six minutes of every meeting in that room.

That is why the discovery has to change before the catalog does. The F.I.N.D. Interview System® that sits at the center of Customer Focused Selling® works on a meeting room the way it works on a print fleet, as long as the rep aims it at the meeting instead of the hardware. Facts first: how many rooms, which platform the company runs on, who books the rooms and who gets the call when they break. Then Important Business Objectives: which meetings actually move revenue, the remote sales demo, the board review, the weekly call with the plant. Then Needs, and then Dreams, which is simply what a good Monday meeting would look like if nobody had to crawl under the table.

The Needs question does most of the work. Owl Labs’ State of Hybrid Work 2026, a vendor survey of 2,000 US knowledge workers, found 66% lose time to technical difficulties and that starting a meeting takes an average of six minutes. Have your rep ask the customer how long their own Monday meeting takes to start, then do the math with them out loud. Six minutes, eight people, five meetings a week is four hours of payroll every week spent watching somebody look for the right input.

Nobody is born knowing to ask that. It is trained, which is the whole point of copier sales training that sells past the box. And if one of your reps becomes the dedicated AV specialist, they will hit the same problems integrators face every day, which is what our AV sales training is built around.

Step 4: Win the Commitment Before the Engineer Opens a Drawing

The most expensive thing a new AV division can do is design a room nobody agreed to buy. The engineer spends two days on a drawing, the rep sends a proposal, and the customer says they will think about it until the next fiscal year. It is the mistake we wrote about in Selling IT Solutions Backwards, just with a ceiling microphone instead of a firewall.

The fix is a gate. Before the design partner spends a single engineering hour, the rep walks the customer through one page that shows their business objectives, the roadblocks in the way, the picture of what the room will do and how everyone will know it worked. That page is what OBJECTIVELens® does, and it earns the commitment before the proposal instead of hoping for it after. If the customer will not agree to the picture, they were never going to agree to the price.

The page matters more in AV because there are more people on the other side of the table. Gartner’s May 2025 sales survey of 632 B2B buyers found 74% of buying teams show unhealthy conflict during the decision. In a meeting room deal that usually means IT wants the platform standard, facilities wants the cables out of sight and the CFO wants a number that ends in “per month,” so put all three in the same OBJECTIVELens® review before the drawing, or you will find out about the disagreement after it.

This is also where the partner earns its fee. Customer Focused Selling® calls it team selling and executive bridging: the rep owns the relationship and the conversation with the executive, and brings the engineer in as the credibility on the room. Settle the commission split between the rep, any AV specialist and the partner before the first deal, not after the argument. Nothing kills a new product line faster than two reps and one commission check.

Step 5: Sell the Room the Way You Already Sell the Copier

The last step in how copier dealers can sell AV is the one they already know best. A copier dealer sells a monthly payment with service built into it every day, and oddly, that muscle is the first thing dealers forget when they add AV. GreatAmerica put it plainly in a September 2025 piece on diversification in the office technology channel: “Traditional print sales have long relied on leasing, but new offerings like IT and AV often default to cash purchases.” A cash sale is a transaction. A monthly contract is an account.

AV as a service, not a cash sale

The financing already exists. TAMCO, a technology financing company that covers AV along with security and networking, bundles AV hardware, support and maintenance into one AV-as-a-service monthly payment, with a Solution Replacement Guarantee, a disaster protection option called Shield, and multiyear support for the length of the term. Dealers offer it through TAMCO’s partner program, so start that conversation during Step 1, not the week a customer says yes.

The term length writes itself. Futuresource Consulting’s Understanding Enterprise AV study, published in July 2026, found 58% of organizations refresh their meeting room technology every two to three years. Match the AV term to that refresh cycle and it renews on the same rhythm as the copier lease sitting in the hallway outside the room. Put CX Detect monitoring into the service contract and the customer can see what they are paying for between refreshes.

The discovery-first approach in how to sell IT financing works on a conference room the same way it works on a server. And the payoff is bigger than the monthly number. CJ Cannata warned in the same 40th dealer survey that for a dealership “solely focused on the traditional core business, the value of their dealership will … continue to decline every day.” Recurring AV revenue is part of how you change that, for the reasons laid out in what ARR means for a managed services business. Nobody has ever leased a conference room by the click. Yet.

The Lease Renewal Is Where the AV Conversation Starts

You do not need a new meeting to start selling AV. The lease renewal is the only meeting where the budget, the decision maker and a reason to change are all in the room at the same time, and most reps spend it defending a rate. The same questions that turn a renewal into an upgrade conversation will open the meeting room conversation, which is the whole premise of copier lease renewal selling.

For accounts you already manage closely, add one line to the agenda of every executive review. A Customer Business Review exists to check the relationship against the objectives it was built on, and “how are your meetings going” is a fair question in that room. It is the same muscle your team builds in managed print services sales training. For accounts that are not yours yet, the conference room question is one of the few openers a competitor’s customer has not heard twelve times, which makes it useful in copier sales prospecting too.

The order is what makes it work. F.I.N.D.® finds the meeting problem, OBJECTIVELens® gets the customer to agree it is worth solving before anyone designs a room, and the Customer Business Review keeps the room on the agenda after it is installed. That sequence is Customer Focused Selling® applied to a new product line, and it is what stops a dealer from engineering rooms nobody bought.

How Copier Dealers Can Sell AV: Your First 90 Days

If you are the dealer principal, the first thirty days are yours. Pick the model, sign one design partner and one monitoring partner, start the financing certification, pull the ten accounts, and decide the commission split while nobody has a deal to argue about.

If you are the sales manager, days thirty-one to sixty are yours. Train the meeting-room version of the discovery and ride along on the first renewals and Customer Business Reviews on the list. The Monday meeting question will feel awkward the first three times and obvious by the fifth. That coaching is a skill of its own, and it is what our sales manager training for copier dealers is for.

Days sixty-one to ninety belong to both of you. Run the first OBJECTIVELens® review with a customer, bring the design partner in only after the customer agrees, and put the first AV-as-a-service proposal in front of them. One signed room in ninety days is a real result. Three agreed pictures is a pipeline.

That is how copier dealers can sell AV without betting the dealership on it. The room was always on your route. What changes is whether your team is trained to ask about it, managed to keep asking, and paid to close it. That is the work we do as one partner for copier dealers, and it is the same work whether the next thing on the list is AV, managed IT or the copier itself.

This post was co-authored by Claude, which has sat through zero meetings and still could not get the display to find the laptop.