Thursday, May 25, 2006
Techies at Trade Shows
I traveled to AIIM on Demand last week with a few goals: get some fodder for Printmode.net (fun stuff), examine the workflow solutions that are enabling web-to-print production (thesis stuff), and network (career stuff).
One thing I noticed as I surfed the show floor, was the number of companies that primarily staff their booths with sales people -- Sales people that don't know the intricacies of the product they are selling.
I thought this was the old way of doing business; where you had the upper management of a printing company sign equipment contracts over a glass of scotch in a skybox at a sporting event during the trade show.
And I guess I thought the new way of doing business at trade shows was to unleash your your techies on the show floor and let them have the system integration, JDF, and other techno conversations with the techies from the vendor side.
Kodak and Xerox (and a few others) do a good job of having the right mix of marketing and engineering people on the floor. You can go into their booths and get the sky high marketing message (a lot of time this is delivered by techies), but you can also get answers to your technical questions: How will your workflow widget integrate with our proprietary web-based fulfillment system that uses a standard SOAP interface to communicate orders. Of course I just made that question up, but you get the point.
My point is that I don't want to talk to sales people at trade shows, I want to talk to the product managers, engineers, and the technical folks.
Posted in: ON DEMAND 2006
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