If You Don't Move To Brand Your Business, Someone Else Will

If you buy into my logic, then you have to ask yourself, "What will change and what should I do about it?" I can't answer both those questions in one column, but there is one thing I firmly believe: You need to market yourself more effectively.

Every vendor spends a great deal of time, effort and money positioning its company image and branding its products, which you incorporate into solutions. Solution providers, on the other hand, historically have done little to no marketing. While that strategy may have worked in the past, it won't work in the future.

Why do I believe you need to become better at marketing? Because marketing drives demand for you and the vendors you represent in your solutions. If you don't do it, somebody else will,and take your business away from you. That somebody could be a vendor that will take the business direct if it creates the demand. Or it could be another solution provider that is marketing itself better than you.

In either case, examples are the best teachers.

I recently spent some time talking with Stephen Viets, president of American Telesource Inc. (ATI), a solution provider that got started in the telephony field in the mid-1980s, migrated to data and now offers conferencing systems and other voice-over-IP solutions.

ATI never thought about marketing much until last summer, when Viets met Tom Flavin of Elevator Pitch, a marketing services firm in San Francisco. Flavin convinced Viets that ATI would benefit from a marketing program.

Viets and his company had some success selling to the San Francisco 49ers, for which ATI put wireless communications systems and sophisticated filming capabilities in place. In addition, ATI specializes in the legal vertical and offers an application designed for county governments.

Flavin worked with Viets to pull together a marketing program that targeted the NFL's other franchises across the country as well as the San Francisco Bar Association. The plan included a variety of approaches such as advertising, press releases, direct mail and other marketing tools.

Viets claims the campaign, just recently launched, has already directed him to opportunities with 11 other NFL teams and has him engaged with some of the top 500 law firms in the San Francisco Bay area.

To finance the campaign, Viets is using a combination of

co-op funds from his vendors and cash out of his own pocket.

Is the campaign working? "I've never done any marketing. In the past, I would get on the phone, start cold calling and maybe get through to 20 percent," Viets said. He noted that his company is definitely getting recognition as a brand and now seems to be closing deals more quickly.

Solution providers need to understand that marketing programs represent a bit of art and science mixed together, so you can't necessarily identify a specific cause and effect.

My main point is that if you are going to build a brand that has value, it is going to be a lot easier to accomplish that goal with a marketing campaign.

Any endeavor in this area should be undertaken slowly, and your goals should be realistic. One thing is certain, marketing will be more important to your business in the future than it has been in the past. The sooner you start to gain some exper-

tise here, the better.