B2b It Content Marketing And It Vars - Video 5 of 18 - Prospect education

From the marketing side, as a writer I hear a lot of marketers tell me, you know customers or prospects, these days are doing their own research. And they're able to compare vendors, they're able to download almost any kind of document that's in the public domain space, on vendors web sites and so forth. And even go out to the consultancies, the big consultancies, and ask them what they think the market is doing. And they can do all this even before, long before they need to bring in a vendor and a VAR, for example, to hear their pitch, to hear their story. SO, what's your perception of that? Are customers and prospects far more educated today when you go in to see them? I think it depends a lot on the company. There are some companies that are, you know, they're very good. They know exactly what they want and a lot of times, you know, the VAR is there simply to facilitate a sale. They know exactly what they want; other than, you know, making sure certain line items are correct on a purchase order or a quote, you're there to make sure they get the equipment sold to them because the vendor won't sell it to them direct. A lot of times my experience is that companies don't have the staff to where they can maintain people that are familiar with all the different aspects, even within networking. So, for example, something like load balancing. A company will know they need a load balancer but they may not have the time, or possibly the expertise, to sift through all the different options and figure out well, OK, I want to use F5, or I want to use A10, or I want to use Citrix. So, they'll bring in a VAR like my company, that sells for a variety of different customers that deal in load balancers. And say, "based on what are requirements are, what solutions would work best for us?" SO, you know, the shortage of IT companies at most companies these days is really, I think, it allows VARs to add (not to should cliched), a little more value. But there are those companies where the people are very knowledgable, and they're very up on all the solutions, and we're simply there to make the sale happen. OK. That's a good point. Maybe it depends on the size of the prospect. I mean, some of the large multinationals (financial services, I used to remember), they even had IT research teams. Not a big team, but they had three of four fairly technical people, across servers, networking, databases. And all those guys did was to go and meet vendors, go and meet the analysts, the research analysts (Gartners etc), and then convince the vendors to lend them kit to try and build test labs. I imagine very few companies, unless they are multinational companies with lots of cash, could even think of having that sort of in-house research going on. Right. I have not, I haven't run across that. In the larger companies, yes, where they have a bunch of engineers, project managers, when you sit down and you talk to someone about a firewall, you're typically talking to an engineer that that's what they do, is firewalls. So, they're already familiar with Checkpoint, and Cisco, you know, Juniper, Palo Alto, and the various options out there, to varying degrees. Some know a lot about a particular vendor that they're using at that point, that they're used in the past; but some do have a good grasp of the entire industry as a whole. it's the smaller ones where you have the engineers that are kind of jack of all trades, whether it's across all disciplines, like storage and networking. Even within networking they're having to do everything - you know, wireless to routing, switching, storage networking. That's where you tend to find less of an overall grasp on the market, as opposed to the large companies where their engineers really understand what's going on. Yeah, I hear you. I think time must be the killer still in the corporate world. They don't have time. Resources. Right. Smaller companies don't have the people that i think they need to ultimately be as successful as I think they could be. Right. OK. Great.