Robert Swanson addresses top

DELTA MAX

MOCA Resellers ... "How to Sell at the Top" 

Lake Tahoe, California           

October 15, 2000 -- "The 'Bad News' is that the days of selling network functions and pushing boxes are about over," Robert Swanson, President of DELTA MAX declared today at the annual sales conference of MOCA, Net@Work.

    "The 'Good News' is that the days of solving customer executive problems are just beginning." 700 of America's top computer resellers heard Swanson describe a current turning point in American information industry dynamics, and a new focus on user departments and company Presidential business initiatives, which not incidentally, are based mostly on information applications and technology.

Customers Want to Buy Business Solutions, Not Product Features

    The resellers were challenged to move their focus from computer and information technology features to business solutions, not just in giving lip service to the solving of problems, but actually restructuring their companies towards analyzing end user departmental issues, in coordination with the customer's IT departments.

    "Meeting these new challenges," Swanson says, "will require you to hire and train business specialists who understand computers, and replace the engineers you currently have, who do not understand business." He further said, "Peter Drucker's famous quip that 'the only two functions of business are Marketing and Innovation', has been mostly ignored by computer industry technology vendors in their current business model of 'box pushing', or merely buying components and software and reselling them at a now-declining profit margin.

    It was fun to push high-margin boxes in the late 1980's and early 1990's, but customers today are demanding much more than just cartons of equipment and software programs to implement E-Commerce. E-Channels are a complete Marketing and Supply Channel Rollout, which needs the buy in and involvement, intense coordination, and complete cooperation of a customer's entire management staff to become successful."

    Interrupted many times by applause and laughter, Swanson described the transformation of resellers. "Just think at what the term 'vendor' implies anyway, a dispenser of technology; efficient, but boring and mechanical. Such a dispenser applies little knowledge, and must operate in a price-competitive model. You have to pay the dispenser before you get the product, and you can't return it if it's not the one you wanted. They always show 15 or so products, but the one you want, IF they have it shown, is usually sold out to previous customers." 

    "Even more significant," he continued, "customers no longer want to have to learn 4 or 5 new vendor-specific technologies just to rollout a new Channel. They want help in structuring a specific solution to their own unique problems, and are willing to pay well for companies that understand how to do this.

    To have a reasonable shot at getting this business, computer resellers and technology service providers must be able to get an appointment with a top executive, listen and understand his/her organization's problems and issues, and describe cost-effective solutions to those problems in business terms the President will relate well to and respond to with actions. That's a tall order for an engineering-oriented technology-related person to fill."

    MOCA is one of America's top distributors of computer systems and software technologies, and is the newest division of Arrow Electronics.

     DELTA MAX is a Convergence Consulting company based in Newport Beach, California, with diverse capabilities in information technology and entertainment industry-related technologies and systems, as well as entertainment content generation, such as feature films, video/TV/DVD  presentations, or Internet Streaming Convergences.

    Robert Swanson is President of Delta Max, and the originator of the term "E-Channel", which describes the functions of computer marketing and supply channel process automation over the Web.

    Contact DELTA MAX for more information about this event.

Copyright © DELTA MAX. All rights reserved.
Revised: September 04, 2008.