VAR Trade Show Brings Customers, Vendors Together

"June, July and August are our biggest three months of the year," said Rick Chernick, CEO of the Green Bay, Wis., solution provider.

He attributes that midyear burst in demand directly to his annual show that this year brought close to 100 vendors and more than 1,000 current and potential customers to the KI Convention Center in downtown Green Bay.

By all accounts, Camera Corner Connecting Point's, or CCCP's, annual conference is one of the oldest and largest solution provider trade shows in the country. CCCP first launched its technology conference about 25 years ago as a way for customers to see the latest technology CCCP vendors had to offer.

"It's fun, it's social and it's a learning experience for our customers," Chernick said. "They can find out what's new and exciting and they can talk to the manufacturers and touch and feel the new products and technology. Every business makes mistakes [in their technology buying decisions]. They have to trust the solution provider, and this is just one way we can save them money by helping them avoid making bad decisions."

Chernick said he tries to make the show a relaxed social event. This year's show theme was a tropical cruise. CCCP employees dressed as a ship's crew and a reggae band and Hawaiian hula dancers entertained guests. Chernick said it's all about having fun.

"We don't take product orders at the show," he said. "Customers think about what they saw, go home and start buying."

Still, Chernick can't always resist doing some business at the show. One of his healthcare customers in attendance at the show set his sights on new high-resolution monitors and mentioned that they might work for the radiology department at a local hospital. Chernick immediately arranged for monitor seed units to be delivered to the customer the next day.

That kind of hands-on contact with new technology and emphasis on customer service is exactly what keeps customers coming to the show year after year.

John Steenport, IT director at Portage Health, a regional health-care provider in Hancock, Mich., has been coming to CCCP's trade show for about 13 years. "I can get product information on a Webcast, but this lets me do a comparison of products and upcoming technology—hands on," he said. "Then when I need to order something, I call or e-mail Rick and it's done. I could probably buy it cheaper somewhere else, but I don't get the service I get from CCCP. It's really important to work with people who know my business because we are all really stressed for time and we need to rely on their people."

Guy Hembroff, chair of the Computer Network and Systems Administration program at Michigan Tech University in Houghton, Mich., who at the behest of Steenport was attending the CCCP conference for the first time, said that reps from all the technology vendors are constantly calling him. "But here I can talk person to person with the vendors and compare the various technologies," he said. "I can get information from vendors via a Webcast, but here it's hands on and I can touch and feel it."

CCCP's distribution and vendor partners alike said the conference gives them a venue to view new business. "There is nothing like it on this scale in my four-state territory," said Neil Stafford, Ingram Micro's account executive, VAR sales for Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Wisconsin.

Stafford said that 11 Ingram Micro employees were at the event helping staff booths for vendors such as Cisco and Hewlett-Packard. And he said that Ingram Leasing, based on conversations with CCCP customers at the show, had quadrupled its number of leads.

Vendors such as HP, too, said that the conference provides a unique opportunity to grow the SMB market. In an HP breakout session on blade servers, for example, not one of the 20 IT professionals in attendance had yet to deploy blades in their business. "We can get in front of 1,000 customers in one day and we can't do that on our own," said Lisa Messner, HP's partner business manager for CCCP.

She noted that 11 HP employees attended the show. "For our legacy HP customers, this gives us a chance to say thanks and reinforce goodwill with the customer and the VAR," she said.

In addition to HP, industry heavyweights Cisco and Microsoft also conducted breakout sessions, as did emerging vendors such as document management company Laserfiche and Web-centric digital signage company Tightrope Media Systems.