With 20 years of experience in the AV industry (and a handful of months on the dark side as a management consultant); Omar has successfully held leadership roles in sales, operations, and engineering and has worked at both the integrator and manufacturer levels. He is passionate about the AV industry and the challenges integrators face; and is a frequent writer and speaker on topics that affect the business of integration from Strategy, to Sales, Marketing, and Operations. With an MBA from a top Canadian University he brings has a unique perspective on the business of integration. Currently, Omar is the Director of Integration Sales for Solotech in Toronto, a global AV integration and events staging powerhouse. He can be reached at oprashad@rogers.com, on LinkedIn (there’s only one Omar Prashad!), on Twitter @omarprashad, or at omar.prashad@solotech.com.
I’ve been grocery shopping weekly for over 20 years, and every week I’ve bought bananas. I’ve bought bananas over 1,000 times in my life; it’s crazy to think about! I really know how to buy a banana. I know how my family likes them, I know how long a banana will need to ripen depending […]
Rant time — I’ve been leading sales teams, directly and indirectly, for close to 15 years now, and I’ve been fortunate to hire a lot of salespeople. I have made many mistakes, learned a ton and I continue to learn more every day. However, here’s my problem: There are way too many salespeople and way […]
I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts a few weeks ago (for my fellow amateur real estate investors out there check out “Bigger Pockets”), and I heard something so profound it stuck with me. “There are those who catch fish and those who rely on those who catch fish.” The simplicity is beautiful, […]
Great salespeople are like ducks, paddling furiously under the water while appearing calm to the outside world. Think about what our great salespeople go through with every prospective customer (budget, authority, buying team, decision-makers, influencers, need, timeline, urgency, objectives, etc.) while focusing on the client’s needs. Sometimes we overlook the most basic and critical distinction […]
Unfortunately, we’ve hit the second wave of COVID-19. Here’s wishing you, your families and your colleagues are safe and healthy. I like the clarity that comes with hindsight. Now’s a great time to look back at some of the business strategies we either initiated (or considered initiating) way back at the beginning of the pandemic. […]
Every integrator is all too familiar with the dreaded scope creep and thanks to a fantastic article by Mark Coxon, we are now familiar with scope leak. While those are both challenges that require more actionable strategies that we’ve seen tabled up to this point, those are topics for another day. Have you ever head […]
So by now you know that I’m a huge proponent of ensuring that your proposal to the customer is carefully thought out and 110 percent customer-centric. It has to be customer focused, succinct, written in language they understand (no technical terms or jargon), short enough that they will actually read it, and solely focused on […]
As integrators, how many of us know exactly what it costs for each proposal we produce? I don’t have any empirical data, but from having had the privilege of doing this for almost 15 years, my anecdotal answer would be: very few. I know, I know — everyone thinks his own are great and his […]
