By Dave Labuskes
InfoComm International

I love to read. In fact, I maintain what I admitted long ago would be a perpetual reading list. Perpetual, because no matter how much I read, there are more books added to it each month than I can get through. And the books are only part of the list. It also includes trade magazines, blogs, white papers, special reports and thought pieces that appear in places throughout the cyber world.

My reading this past weekend included a couple blog entries. One was by Tom Stimson (one of InfoComm’s past presidents and more recently our Master of Ceremonies for InfoComm Live 2015) somewhat optimistically entitled The Final Word on Shrinking Margins and another by Christopher Maione entitled Where Did Our Margins Go? Both examine the changing nature of our industry and the impact on profit margins for our members. As fate must have had it, I also read, InfoComm International’s March 2015 Economic Snapshot Report in the same sitting. For the uninitiated, this is a report put together by a professional market research team and made available for free to all InfoComm members. Guess what I found beginning on page 53 of the report?

AV end users (the actual recipients of “Dear Client” letters) reveal, “Other than cost, what could AV vendors do to make it easier for their organization to acquire AV solutions that further their organization’s mission.” Why haven’t you and your marketing team already read this? This is like reading the playbook of the other team.

Here’s some of what they said:

• Ensure quality and completed work. We have had a number of bad vendors who either did sloppy or incomplete work.
• Improved project management on AV purchase and installation projects.
• Bring new AV equipment to our locations for team members to see the equipment operate and for hands-on operation.
• Create AV show rooms with the latest technology… let us test drive it.
• Help us explain to our users why Solution X is better than Solution Y.
• Keep us up to date with current trends and solutions available.
• Keep us informed on innovative solutions that will help us support our users more efficiently.
• Provide real life examples on how to use their equipment.

Themes that I see interwoven within these are:

• Do good work.
• Help me see your value, then help me communicate it to my colleagues.
• Help me understand where all of this is going.

In short (cliché alert), demonstrate your value to the prospect by making their life easier, making them look good, or helping them get their job done less expensively or more effectively. If you’ve known me for any length of time, I’ve probably subjected you to a lecture on this basic three-legged stool for long-term client relationships.

But wait, there’s more. Coupled with this information is analysis of industry expectations. And in that analysis we see something that certainly raised my eyebrows. The confidence of the industry (measured via the InfoComm Performance Index or IPI) reflects a sizeable gap based on company size… and the gap is growing wider. The largest gap that was previously seen was set in the June 2014 survey, with an 11 point spread between the smallest companies (those with gross revenue/turnover of up to $2 million) and the largest companies (those with gross revenue/turnover of $25 million or more). The gap in the January 2015 sample reaches 14 points for the past six month IPI.

Here’s what I get from all this. There are as many ways to differentiate your company in the marketplace as there are prospective customers. They just aren’t the same ways that worked five years ago. Don’t write letters, solicit letters. Don’t talk about your problems, talk about the client’s problems. And craft your relationship in a manner that ideally targets the strengths of your company to the needs of your prospect.

And say “no” when the structure of the deal moves you away from this alignment. Over the course of my career, politely saying “no” to a client or prospect regarding requests that wouldn’t work for us has been the most effective close I’ve ever utilized.

Is the optimism of the larger firms reflective of their success in recognizing this? Or are they larger because the already recognized this reality. As much fun as “chicken-and-egg” discussions can be, engaging in them takes me from my reading time, so you’ll have to debate that one among yourselves.

This column is reprinted with permission from InfoComm International and originally appeared here.