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Volume 1, Issue 4 — October 16, 2012 |
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The End of Bid Work?
By Anthony Coppedge
House of Worship Technology Consultant
There are entire industries that revolve around bid work. RFPs (request for proposals), submittals, revised bids, bid scope documents and bid contracts are all a part of this ecosystem and the A/V/L manufacturers, integrators and contractors are all well-familiar with the hassle of the bid.
Bid work is not my favorite because it almost always lacks relational selling. It’s not that I haven’t won some significant bids during my A/V/L sales career, but I distinctly recall the anti-climatic feeling that came from a the signed purchase order on a bid project. It seemed to me that winning five-, six- and even seven-figure bids should have felt better to me. It didn’t because our team simply met an artificial budget cap generally set by someone that didn’t understand our scope of work intimately.
Bids, Contracts and Covenants
Look, I realize that bids are here to stay. It’s a reality in the house of worship market, too, but I’ve seen a trend slowly gain traction over the last decade where churches are going through the bid processes without ever really wanting to evaluate all submissions. The reason is simple: They very often want to be in a covenant relationship with a person (not just the vendor) who understands them, listens and has their best interests at heart.
In the church world, you’ll here this term ‘covenant’ from time to time. It’s based on God’s covenant (binding promise) with His people found both in the Old Testament and New Testament of the Bible. The general idea here is that a covenant represents more than a contractual obligation, but a promise of your character to be faithful to your word and their character being faithful to their word, too.
In the context of our discussion today, this simply means they (church representatives) often desire for you as a person, not just a representative of your organization, to build a relationship that is mutually beneficial. The church wants and needs your expertise; you can benefit from not only the purchase order and project, but the favor of the church to come to you time and again for additional work while also sharing your name/brand with their other church friends.
It’s pretty rare that a church would use the word ‘covenant’ in a contract document, but if you want to ever get past pure bid work in the House of Worship market, you’ll need to recognize the underlying desire to be in a long-term relationship of many church leaders.
There Are Bids, And Then There Are Bids
The trend I’m sharing with you isn’t about the end of all bid work, nor the antiquating of bids. Instead, there’s a growing reality in which churches find a person (who works for a vendor) that they build a trusting relationship with so that the bids become less and less important — possibly to the point of obsolescence.
It may be that the first time that your salesperson works with a church, the bid process is fairly typical: The church has a need and wants at least three bids on the project. This is the stereotypical bid that is based as much on price as it is on crossing every ‘t’ and dotting every ‘i’. However, once the church learns of the character of their salesperson/account manager and the integrity of the vendor in meeting (or even exceeding) expectations, the next bid project has a good chance of being less of an archetypal RFP and more of a formality to ensure the budgets aren’t out of whack.
So, there are bids, and then there are bids. The company that’s given their account manager the freedom to build the relationship over time will more likely find this trend working to their advantage as a preferred vendor.
The Bid Threshold
Another term you’ll often hear in the house of worship market is stewardship. Essentially, church leaders are tasked with making sure that time, energy and money are used effectively and efficiently, plus they desire to be good stewards (those put in charge of something that belongs to someone else). Good stewardship has less to do with how much is saved and more to do with how much isn’t wasted. As such, vendors have the opportunity to not only speak this language, but offer churches unique buying arrangements that reassures the church the price point is fair (market value) and that your company will be responsive in taking care of any issues. As mentioned above, this is referred to as a preferred vendor relationship.
I surveyed churches informally and found that a common threshold for making purchases without a bid process is generally around $5,000 and less. Over time, however, as the relationship matures and credibility is established, this dollar amount can increase to make it easier for the church to make necessary updates without the arduous task of creating an RFP. As an example, one church technical director said it this way: “We always get a counter bid on higher ticket items, but ultimately price isn’t always the selling point. This is especially true if some type of install is required or potential upgrades are needed.”
When projects are large enough to go to bid, these preferred vendors are less concerned about low bids and are more concerned about addressing the proposed scope of work within the context of the established relationship. Sure, a bid will most likely happen, but it’s more to ensure the ‘gut check’ that your proposed solution and prices are not out of whack with the rest of the competition.
Firms that do not take more than a financial interest in bottom-dollar sales to the House of Worship market will find themselves losing bids (which they’re probably doing anyway) and saying it’s unfair that your firm is consistently performing well in the church market. This isn’t the government, health care or military market. More and more, vendors that put consistent effort into the House of Worship vertical and focus on building advantageous agreements in place via relational selling will find the repeat business and positive word-of-mouth creating the kind of consistency — and margins — that regularly beat the bid market mentality.
The End of Bid Work?
In a recent column, I talked about the rapid growth of multi-site churches as being a trend that manufacturers and integrators alike needed to understand. Of all church clients, those have a multi-site DNA are probably the ultimate example of the ideal client for building a preferred vendor relationship with, as they’ll have more needs far more often than the typical church. Here, the chance to build the relationship is easier, faster and creates more revenue (with higher margins, too). They’ll probably still have bids for new campuses or campus-wide upgrades, but they’ll also look to their preferred vendor to set the standard.
The reality is that creating marketing campaigns, specialized buying programs and even extending beyond sales into the rental and service areas for the House of Worship market will help establish these preferred vendor relationships. Quality is key when quantity is the race to the bottom – and that’s a race you don’t want to win.
Will bid work ever come to end in the church vertical? Nah. But will A/V/L vendors find better margins, better opportunities and better word-of-mouth referrals by providing churches with better-than-bid successes? Absolutely.
A former staff member at three mega churches and church technology consultant, Anthony Coppedge has developed a respected reputation as a leader in technical and communications circles within the church marketplace. Reach him at anthony@anthonycoppedge.com or on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/anthonycoppedge
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The Cloud and the Church
By Anthony Coppedge
House of Worship Technology Consultant
The promise of ‘The Cloud,’ Internet-based software access and storage, has firmly taken root in both the desktop and mobile spaces. Even if people can’t easily articulate what ‘The Cloud’ means, they do know that their favorite companies, such as Google, Amazon and Apple, have made cloud-based services a big deal and an everyday occurrence. Churches, too, are adopting cloud-based tools such as online church management software, service scheduling software, volunteer management, file storage (Dropbox being a key leader) and document sharing.
The A/V/L industry has, of course, been providing some cloud-enabled technologies for several years now, but has been slow to develop vertical-market applications to help add value to their products and services. Some applications have made headway, such as digital signage, but that’s largely because hosted content is logistically beneficial for management and curation. And the control systems big boys, Crestron and AMX, have been thinking this way for a long time and are continually innovating due to the growth and ubiquity of mobile devices and 24/7 Internet access.
Network-able Is Not Enough
I remember back in the ‘90s how Cat5 network LAN ports began cropping up on all kind of A/V/L gear. The speed of the networks was more than fast enough for instruction transfer for things like SMPTE, MIDI and DMX, so the computer networking interface was integrated into the media space.
Today, it’s expected that just about any piece of electronics is addressable (thanks largely to IR and RS232), but there’s a difference in being on a network and on the Internet.
Having gear addressable is helpful for status checks and basis communication, but in today’s broadband world, the industry should be doing a lot better. In the past, manufacturers almost always made their software proprietary, sometimes going so far as to have unique platforms within the own brand for software/firmware access. Eventually, the late ‘90s and early 2000s saw Windows-based software for adding additional functionality to what would otherwise be status-only commands. Very few bothered to create both PC and Mac-compatible software, so even an all-Mac church would still have the token PC running just for these situations.
The guys at AMX and Crestron have this figured out and have provided their own software (proprietary once again) to be the central command-and-control point for anything with a communications-capable setup. That’s not such a bad world, and no offense to the control guys, but that’s just too far behind the times — especially considering the consumer world of fast, cheap and reliable web-based tools. I’m not suggesting AMX and Crestron are going the way of the Dodo, but I am saying that the potential value add is to leverage browser-based and mobile-based platforms that are open source to pave the way to better integration and access.
Mobile Isn’t the Future, It’s Right Now
In the A/V/L space, I can think of only a few environments (military, NOCs, etc.) where a non-proprietary, web/mobile-based open source platform wouldn’t be incredibly valuable. With login access controls, even publicly available systems (corporate networks, blogs, online database access) have made their way to the cloud and to mobile device access.
Churches — especially multi-site/multi-campus/multi-venue — are begging for anytime, anywhere access to their technology. From iOS to Android to browser-based platforms, we’re used to being able to control our consumer technology with ease. It’s super easy to set my DVR to record whatever I want from anywhere I have a cell or Wi-Fi signal. I can check to see if my NEST heating and air conditioning control has left the air on. I’m used to mobile access and mobile control of certain programming. Where is this in the A/V/L world?
Sure, some manufacturers are offering web-based access (yea!), but mobile-platform specific control? Look around: It’s the glaringly obvious elephant in the room. Or maybe it’s the missing elephant in the room!
It’s not unreasonable to be able to want at least mobile access to my A/V/L technology without requiring me to put in a full-blown third-party control system. I may benefit from said control system, but what I’m saying is that it shouldn’t be required.
And lest the systems integrators think I’m leaving them on the sidelines of this discussion, I believe by adding open source mobile and browser-based platforms to the mix, these integrators can add additional service opportunities to their installations, once again endearing them to the client for being a partner in ensuring their technology success.
The Cloud and the Church
Stepping beyond the immediate future, it’s not hard to envision entire divisions of integrators focusing on address-ability, control-ability, program-ability and adding the pièce de résistance of content sharing and curation. Any multi-venue organization will have the desire (if not the outright need) to not only monitor system performance, but system resource sharing.
Going back to the network scenario, the idea of pushing content — whether that’s video/screen content, audio content and/or communication/control content — to multiple devices is both a smart level of control and redundancy. In the church world, I’d call this volunteer-proofing the systems and processes.
Think, for example, of standardizing on technology in multiple venues and sharing the media content on the cloud to every device that needs a signal. Or sharing cue notes for a synchronized media playback across multiple venues or locations while updating curated content for geographic specific contexts. The possibilities are endless, but the common factor is the cloud. Which, of course, takes us back to the original point of creating browser- and mobile-based open source platforms (or, at the least, a recognized industry standard platform for the Web).
Playing Nicely Together
I suppose this may be something of a pipe dream if the manufacturers don’t want to play nicely together by sharing, minimally, a freely-accessible platform. Even so, if the brains of the engineering societies could link arms across the audio, video and lighting industry, the standardization of a mobile platform isn’t such a far-off idea.
In the meantime, the power of the Internet has clearly shifted the ultimate decision-making power in the hands of the consumer. Both manufacturers and integration firms will see the handwriting on the wall: go mobile or get left behind. The consumer world isn’t always the best leader, but where innovation happens, people tend to follow. Churches are just like other organizations: They’re looking for solutions to their week-in, week-out problems; they just simply focus on weekend problems. Addressing this need isn’t simply beneficial to the house of worship market, it is a necessary step into the current century and a future of mobile access, control and curation.
1999 is calling and it wants its 9-pin RS232 controls back.
A former staff member at three mega churches and church technology consultant, Anthony Coppedge has developed a respected reputation as a leader in technical and communications circles within the church marketplace. Reach him at anthony@anthonycoppedge.com
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