VARTECH 2015 Media Panel: "Dandelion Marketing" And Other Terms VARs Need To Know
By Jim Roddy, VP of Marketing, RSPA
Whenever I participate on a conference panel, I joke there are two keys to a good discussion: make sure your microphone is on and, for the men, that your fly is up. I took one additional step for the media panel discussion at VARTECH 2015, and I’m glad I did. I brought with me on stage paper and a pen and ended up taking several notes from our discussion. It was a learning experience for the hundreds of channel executives in attendance — myself included.
Panelists for the Sept. 16 session included Jay McBain of ChannelEyes, Angela Diffly of Vertical Systems Reseller magazine, Maribel Salgado of Boletin de la Computacion, and me representing Business Solutions.
Following are three terms that played a role in our conversation that I wanted to share with you. It will behoove VARs to understand and master these.
Dandelion Marketing: McBain mentioned this term during our discussion on VAR marketing. “When I worked at IBM, they used to say, ‘Do three things perfectly and you’ll be successful.’ That used to be true in marketing when there were only three options but now there are 30 options,” McBain said. “Today if you do only three things in marketing, even if you do them perfectly, you’ll still lose. I think to succeed you need to be roughly right on 30 things.”
That’s when McBain introduced and recommended the concept of Dandelion Marketing. Explaining the analogy, he said when dandelion seeds are spread across a patch of grass, some bloom and others don’t. Then, every year after, sure enough that patch turns bright yellow. So with marketing, test and measure several tools, keep what works, and stop doing what doesn’t take.
That’s a shift for solutions providers who traditionally limit their breadth of marketing tactics and are slow to embrace newer tools such as social media, marketing automation, content marketing, and search engine marketing. “Marketing has changed a lot since we last took a class on it,” McBain noted.
Internet of Things (IoT): The media panel talked at length about IoT and its future in the channel. Nobody can predict for sure what will happen, but statistics reveal there’s plenty of opportunity. One data point that was shared came from a Cisco report that estimates by 2025 there will be 50 billion IoT devices which will result in a cost savings of $19 trillion for the companies who implement IoT technology. Even if Cisco’s estimate is off by 50 percent, that’s quite the opportunity for resellers to get in front of.
I shared this quote from David Pence, the founder and CEO of solutions provider Acumen IT, from his recent BSM feature story: “I believe in the future it’s possible we could be involved in troubleshooting Nike sneakers and other wearable technology as the world moves toward the Internet of Things (IoT).”
A reseller I talked with here said it’s easy to predict what technology will affect our channel, but the difficulty is when and to what degree. That describes IoT perfectly. The advice for resellers today is to train your team on the technologies that make up IoT — cloud, sensing, and mobility — so you’re prepared for tomorrow.
Remote Monitoring And Management (RMM): The majority of BlueStar resellers focus on point of sale and data collection technologies and historically haven’t embraced managed services. However at VARTECH 2015, nearly all of the several dozen resellers I talked with were at least in the information-gathering stages on managed services technologies.
One VAR here who is well down the path is Josh Byers, the president and CEO of LoneStar POS in Texas, who was featured on the March 2015 cover of BSM (A Marriage Of POS & Managed Services) and stopped by the our booth Tuesday to say hello. Lonestar’s story is compelling. A BlueStar reseller focusing on point of sale, they embraced RMM and managed services which spiked a 100 percent revenue growth rate in 2014 and has the company on pace for an additional 50 percent growth this year.
When I shared those numbers during the media panel, I could hear some VARs in the audience gasp. Triple-digit growth is breathtaking for sure.
VARTECH 2015 is being held Sept. 14-18 on the Royal Caribbean Enchantment of the Seas cruise ship traveling from Port of Cape Canaveral, FL to CocoCay, Bahamas. VARTECH, the annual conference for value-added distributor BlueStar partners, focuses on data collection, point of sale, mobility, digital signage, RFID, and security. For more information on BlueStar and VARTECH, go to www.BSMinfo.com/solution/InsideBlueStar.