Bob Dirkes Posts

In an educational session on the last day of CompTIA’s Breakaway 2012, Keith Eades, CEO at Sales Performance International, sent attendees home with six pointers for better selling: Adopt a customer- and solution-centric philosophy – i.e., answer the customer’s problem. Use a buyer-aligned sales process – i.e., know more about how buyers buy than how your organization sells. Align sales and marketing – messaging, tools and conversations. Use management systems and disciplines that foster and sus ...

The concept of vendors syndicating content to channel partners is not new.  But integrating the syndicated content into marketing automation is an idea starting to take hold.“Channel partners have been using vendor content for three main purposes: training and education for staff and customers, leveraging powerful product brands and sometimes just because they don’t have the experience and time to market their own services,” said Tony Serino, president and founder of Serino Channel Services.Tony ...

The skies over Las Vegas were appropriately overcast Tuesday morning as the media/analyst panel discussion “Cutting through the Fog of the Cloud” commenced at CompTIA’s Breakaway 2012.Rain in Vegas is an anomaly any time of year, but showers in late July are especially rare.  An occasional sun shower is not out of the ordinary during the summer in the valley.  But given the desert conditions and the blaring sun that regularly delivers temps above 100 degrees, the raindrops typically sizzle and d ...

Those of us who have owned and operated small businesses understand a few essential truths: Buying accounting software doesn’t make you an accountant. Hiring an accountant doesn’t mean you’re managing your books. And understanding the two points above won’t necessarily make your business profitable.Fact is making your business successful is tough without personally managing your profit and loss (P&L) statement. It comes down to data, CompTIA CFO Dave Sommer told Breakaway attendees this morn ...

Lester Keizer offers this perspective to MSPs, “If you don’t have a business continuity/disaster recovery plan you can share with clients, you are doing them a disservice that borders on unethical.”Keizer, CEO of Business Continuity Technologies, led today’s “Business Continuity Planning: The Top IT Priority for 2011” session at Breakaway 2011.  The program was the winner of the Attendee-Voted Breakaway Wildcard Session – and with good reason.  Events during the last decade – such as the Septemb ...

A common them cut across today’s panel discussion “Business Operations Challenges: What’s Keeping Solutions Providers Up at Night?” at Breakaway 2011: Expectation Management.  Panelist responses to questions from moderator Regina Ciardiello, managing editor, SMB Nation, were laced with the consistent message “manage expectations before expectations manage you.”Vetting vendors for partnerships?  Manage expectations, said panelist Ilene Rosoff, CEO and president, The Launch Pad.  “We approach vend ...

CompTIA President CEO Todd Thibodeaux kicked off Breakaway 2011 yesterday morning saying, “We’ve lined up our most robust slate of content and training for all of you, so that you can truly accelerate your business.” He wasn’t exaggerating, and the workshops starting shortly after morning keynotes concluded backed him up.I headed for the “Cloud Business Development Workshop” early.  Good thing. The session was SRO – Standing Room Only.So many VARs wanted to attend the workshop that the afternoon ...

“Know the specialties!” Patti Dodgen, CEO of healthcare systems integrator Hielix, told VARs who attended the Breakaway session: “Building Your HIT Blueprint – Assessing the IT Needs of a Healthcare Provider to Become a Trusted Advisor.” The session was “powered by” CompTIA’s Healthcare IT Community, and each participant received a “Healthcare IT: Workflow Overview” pamphlet that provided critical fundamentals for VARs to learn in thi ...

Why should IT technicians inside an organization become “User Advocates?”  The answers given by Mike Meyers, president of Total Seminars LLC, were typed in capital letters on one slide: “MONEY, POWER, NERDFAME.”Meyers’ point to the more than 20 IT educators attending his energetic E2C session at Breakaway, called “Becoming a User Advocate,” was that they should motivate their high-school and community college students to break the “classic nerd” stereotypes of being introverted and reclusive.  W ...

Overheard at the Education to Careers (E2C) Summit today at CompTIA Breakaway in the San Antonio Hill Country…Alan Rowland, CompTIA’s business development manager for education, spied Danny Perry in the audience and asked him to come to the front of the room.  Perry’s organization – Tech Corps Texas – is helping “students to complete their education and to compete in the global workforce.”  The program aims to reach middle and high schoolers with structured IT learning programs at an early age.  ...