Does an investment of three days of my time for a vendor make sense?
In the last three days, I have been traveling and attending meetings to help our distribution partner, Ingram Micro. In my role of Small and Medium Business Alliance (SMBA) council member, I help Ingram to validate and improve their programs for our market segment.
Shouldn’t you just decide who to buy from, pay them for their products and/or services, and finish the transaction? If the vendor doesn’t meet your expectations you have a fight and select another vendor, right? I don’t think so. In the complex field of Small and Medium business technology products it is all about building relationships!
Ingram Micro plays a critical role in our success to deliver state of the art IT solutions to small and medium sized businesses in the Calgary and Red Deer area. It matters that the computer systems in a business are always up and running. More and more of clients are requesting redundant Internet connections, because they can’t afford any down time. A quick disaster recovery strategy allows our clients to recover quickly from a server malfunction.
In most small businesses today, no information technology means no business! The Ingram SMBA program helps us to select and support the right technologies for our clients. The same robust products that the enterprise clients use, but for an affordable small business budget. Once a year Ingram hosts a North America wide conference event. Last year this event was in Charlotte, and it was a great opportunity for us to meet a number of manufacturers, who use use Ingram Micro as their distribution channel.
The result of my visit to this event was that we started a relationship with Meraki Wireless Networks, a manufacturer of innovative wireless solutions. As a direct result of this event we have acquired $25,000 of net new sales by selling a Meraki wireless solution to a college in central Alberta and we will also be providing wireless services for an event in May in the Calgary Convention Centre. This shows that an investment in building relationship with vendor partners and the distribution channel can definitely pay off!
In our meetings in the Buffalo location of Ingram we had tour of the impressive Solution Centre and also had an opportunity to educate vendors HP, Cisco and AVG about dealing with the SMB Channel. I am already looking forward to attending the SMBA conference at the end of August this year in Orlando! Thanks to al the folks at Ingram to facilitate the SMBA council members and give us the opportunity to provide feedback. Listening to determine how they can help us better is a great first step, to act and implement improvements will be the next step.
Rene, being actively involved in the entire chain is crucial to business success. What you do with Ingram or other vendors may not directly fill the pipeline however when it comes down to understand the needs of Canadian Small Business you have immediately put yourself ahead of all others. We all need to be involved in building a healthy and strong business community.
Stuart R. Crawford
ULISTIC Inc.
Canadian Search Engine Optimization Specialists in Calgary