Bob Zagami has attended some 30 AIIM Service Provider Executive Forums over the years and he’ll be back again this year, April 1-3 in Orlando. He’s truly bullish on this year’s Service Provider Executive Forum, which is running concurrently with AIIM. As an added benefit, attendees of the Service Provider Executive Forum can attend AIIM where they’ll be able to network with end users and other decision makers.
Zagami, principal consultant at IMAGAZ and former chairman of the AIIM International Board of Directors, presents a compelling case for attending this year’s event, noting that there’s been a complete rebranding and reengineering of the show. “It’s not a trade show, it’s a high level end user senior level conference.”
The rebranding is the result of the last Service Provider Executive Forum in 2012, which Zagami says was a disappointment. “We took a step back and said if this is going to be relevant in today’s business environment we have to reengineer and rebrand it and make it [appealing] to service providers.”
Up until 2012 the conference was designed solely for service providers. “It was those of us who grew up in this business for the past 40 years,” explains Zagami. “We’d share best practices, learn from each other, and network with each other. Up until three or four years ago it worked perfectly.”
Then came the recession and with that changes in the imaging business, a change in customers, and a change in customer expectations. “But we didn’t change the conference to meet their needs,” states Zagami. “Now we have and this is the first year of rebranding it into a meaningful event.”
He’s telling service providers as well as office technology dealers providing AIIM-type services that if they only attend one event a year, this ought to be the one. “If you spend the money to go to this event and you don’t pick up a new idea in marketing, whether it’s on the production floor, whether it be hiring the right kind of sales people, whether it’s prospecting at the AIIM conference and meeting a couple of prospects you never had the opportunity to connect with before, if you can’t recoup that $1,000 investment maybe you shouldn’t be in the business to begin with.”
He adds that those interested in understanding new technologies, understanding new approaches, and understanding new marketing concepts, will get the best bang for their buck at this conference.
“When I owned my own company I always looked forward to this event because it’s a learning experience,” says Zagami.
The most dramatic difference between this Service Provider Executive Forum and past events is the co-location with the AIIM conference. The AIIM conference will have 750 senior level end user prospects. “They’re not going to that conference to be a prospect for the service providers, they’re going because they want the education and information dispensed at the AIIM conference in the keynote speeches and conference sessions and from the 30+ sponsors,” says Zagami.
Those who register for the Service Provider Executive Forum will also be able to attend the AIIM keynotes, the coffee breaks, and mingle with the heavy hitters attending the AIIM conference.
Zagami feels that those attending the Service Provider Executive Form will have a competitive edge when they return home. “That puts them at a level above their competitors who aren’t there because they’re going to be able to meet a prospect in an informal setting and have a chance to tell their story,” says Zagami. “If you’re not there you can’t tell your story.”
He rattles off more reasons to attend the conference. “If you’re young enough, if you want to stay in the business, and if you’re smart enough to realize you have to change your business, this is the best place to get that information.”
The conference program for Wednesday includes a full schedule of end user presentations. “We’re bringing to them senior level executives who are going to tell 200-250 service providers how to do business with their company, what types of products and services they use, how they make decisions with respect to IP applications or workgroup applications, are they going to do on-premise software or go to the cloud, what factors come into play with risk, compliance, and security,” notes Zagami.
Following the presentations, Zagami will moderate a round table session with end users and take questions from the floor.
“Where else can you sit in front of an executive and hear what their problems are, how they want to solve those problems, and then [talk to them about] how you can solve their problems while describing your the solutions?” adds Zagami.
Another reason for being there is that service providers are facing increased competition from people they never ran into before such as companies like Pitney Bowes, Ricoh and Xerox who are offering large scale facilities management and have embedded themselves within major corporations.
“They are so embedded in these corporations and these in-house facilities are taking business away from service providers and they don’t even know it,” claims Zagami.
Add to that the copier/MFP dealers who have figured out they need a networking or IT group because they’ve got utilities on the devices they sell that are driving images to an ECM solution. “Many of them are selling ECM solutions so they are direct competitors to service providers who never had to worry about them before,” states Zagami. “Might you want to go to a conference that has some of those people there if you did nothing but listen to the language they use, or how they sell, or whatever; you’ll be better prepared to compete against them,” notes Zagami. “Or you might want to sell to them.”
He contends that office technology dealers are struggling to get into the imaging business and that the top end of the ECM strategy for most is offering solutions such as DocuWare, Square9, and Laserfiche. “For the most part they haven’t quite figured out how to live in our world,” opines Zagami. “They view software as another box and hire people from our industry. These are good people who understand document management, document imaging, and scanning, but when they have the sales meeting the end of the month and ask how many boxes you’ve sold, and it’s 20, 10, or on the ECM it’s none because it’s a six or 12-month cycle and they don’t have a support team in place to support that.”
He feels that some of these dealers are going to get smart and buy one of these service providers, which will provide them with their own service bureau. “That copier dealer already has more customers than the service provider,” says Zagami. “They need to introduce new services such as document conversion and ECM software and integrate that into the mix.”
If you’re a service provider or an office technology dealer those reasons are worth considering when evaluating whether or not to attend this year’s Service Provider Executive Forum.
