15. 12 Barcoding Boot-Camps Educational Events 58 Regional Road shows 115 Articles on Vertical Market Selling 64 Product focused Web Seminars 6 Cloud Computing Seminars 4 Webinars on emerging opportunities Investments In Your Success
16. Sales Development 12 Sessions on Negotiation 8 Sessions on delivering value 12 sessions on delivering solutions 7 on driving demand 4 ISV Live Roadshows Investments In Your Success
17. TECH SERVICES 21 people 85,000 support cases annually 2,500 devices supported
Let me thank of you again for your support – without you we’re not here and we sincerely appreciate you allowing us to participate in the success of your business. Let’s get started with why I think that TOGETHER we are much stronger team. For those of you that are paying close attention to the conference guide, you’ll see that Greg Dixon is coming up next to talk about the future of cloud computing – it’s a future that we believe will additional revenue opportunities for those that are preparing themselves for the future. Greg’s title is “The Future is Cloudy”I don’t believe that our future is cloudy. We have unique view of the POS and AIDC world – we tend to be our vendors largest customer/distributor and we sell to more VARs than any other distributor. This gives us unparalleled visibility into what's going on in the channel. Personally, I believe that the future is not cloudy – my team talks to over 5,000 resellers on a monthly basis and what we are hearing is:There’s a bunch of deals going on now and tens of millions of dollars in pent up demand – this is demand when the dam breaks – I believe will bring unprecedented growth for our industry. So you won’t hear me complaining today
This is not a conference about battening the hatches and playing defense. This is a gathering of: 300 of the top resellers in North America, the top manufacturers in POS and AIDC AND the #1 Global Distributor of POS and AIDC products This is about opportunity and the tools, the support and the services that can help you buck the media and trends. This is about turning challenges into opportunity and about celebrating growth.
Each year my team asks you a question. “What are the top three challenges you are facing in your business?”This year we got responses from 1,810 resellers and collected 3,934 responses. Hopefully by walking through some of the primary points of this data you will get a feel for how you compare to the other 299 guys in the room.
We boiled the 3,934 responses down to about eight buckets, but today I’m going to walk you through the top four – Training & Education – 58% of you see this as a challenge to the ongoing improvement of your organizationThe Economy – 51% of you had something to say about it.Marketing – 47%And lastly, Supply Chain ChallengesI’m going to start with supply chain.
26% of you said that supply chain challenges impacted your business. Considering what we saw, I’m happy that it was only 26% of you felt it was a big issue. I can stand here with a straight face a tell you that we played a big role in smoothing out many of the problems by: Working closer with resellers on forecastingIncreasing our average inventory by nearly $30 million At the peak of the problems we slowed our inventory turns down and at one point exceeded $156m in total inventoryWe understand that resellers have gotten used to have access to product when they want it and in the quantities they need. We will continue to make investments that reflect our position as the #1 distributor in the industry.
We stack them deep and high. Ten years ago we used to brag about stocking 4,000 different sku’s - look at us today.
This is a WOW moment.
One of the foundational elements of our business is working with you to make your team stronger.
Risk Funds –Limit IncreasesSpikesCreative…….
Smash your televisions. Stop reading the newspaper. Some people did have tough years and I realize that this type of this growth is not universal to the channel. However, collectively – those of you in this room grew 60% with us in the past fiscal year – you added $215m to our revenue for the year. This isn’t what you hear on the news, it’s definitely