Every year I take a step back to look at the solutions we’re providing. The goal is to ensure the holistic, “big picture” results DistinctAV is known for are being achieved. In an industry as complex as ours, it’s important to stay one step ahead so we can avoid the rise and fall of all the over-hyped products.
Here’s a summary of my most recent assessment: (more…)
Marketing is the art and science of determining what people want to buy and how to advertise it to appeal to their needs.
Product manufacturers often miss the connection between marketing and product development.
Many OEMs have Product Development and Sales/Advertising teams. When the CEO wants more sales volume, they often add Business Development teams filled with the top sales people they can find.
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Almost everybody knows the frustration of shopping for home electronics. There are dozens of options with hundreds of features and thousands of combinations.
Add the hundreds of real-life scenarios and situations where and how you will use these systems, and let’s not forget everything that you don’t know or have not experienced yet.
Confused? Frustrated? Vapor-lock set in yet? It should. It’s perfectly normal for any rational person.
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I’ve changed my own oil in our cars for years but with my busy schedule (and the van was was 2000 miles overdue) I took the bait when I saw a guy swinging a “No Wait” Jiffy Lube sign out at the street. It was 6 PM and the rush-hour traffic was starting to dwindle. I swung around the block into their lot.
So picture this: 4 grease monkeys in slightly dirty uniforms hanging around doing apparently nothing, looking like they needed one more client for the day so they could earn enough for cigarettes. I didn’t have a good feeling.
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The single biggest complaint I hear from really smart custom electronics integrators is: “Every time we try a new system, it looks great at first but then we find its limitations.”
Next thing from their mouth is usually “…and they don’t seem to care about what we are asking for.”
Welcome to NIH Syndrome (Not Invented Here).
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Performance contracting is the practice of selling and installing a system for a client, then receiving a percentage of the savings as revenue over the life of the system.
The PC firms I’ve worked with typically consist of 50% lawyers, 25% Venture Capital providers, and 25% engineers. An indication of how complex the business can be.
Most of the complexity comes from the fact that the property owner has direct control over their use of the system which makes it complicated to measure “savings” from the baseline.