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Learn From My ‘Out of Industry’ Experience

Published: July 21, 2014

They say perspective is a key to enlightenment.

Perhaps that is because until you have seen the world through another’s eyes, your viewpoint may be limited if not altogether obstructed.

If there is one thing that people know about the commercial integration industry, it is that people that enter the industry tend to stay there.

For lack of a better term, the industry is almost incestuous in that people move around, but rarely do they ever leave. Think about it. Over the past decade our industry has found itself converging with, or perhaps infiltrated by, industry outside of our comfort zone.

New technologies have disrupted the old, and we have moved from a world where technology was designed and procured as substantial apex, to a world where we can collaborate more effectively on our mobile device than we can on a decked out presentation space from just a few years ago.

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As we stare into the eyes of change, substantial change, a kind of change that not only gradually shifts our businesses, but redefines it, we seek guidance to better understand how this change should be approached.

Perhaps it is obvious that we must embrace change to some capacity, for as different as the technology is today, many integrators’ businesses aren’t that different from 5 years ago. The same product types, service offerings and go to market strategies have continued with only an occasional glancing eye to look over our shoulders, check our mirrors and proceed forward down the road to what’s next and although the future is unknown, it is safe to say this road won’t go forever.

Begging the question, where does our perspective come from?

Technology has disrupted just about every industry on the planet.

Just the other day I was listening to marketing heads of some of the biggest companies in the world talk about how they are attracting customers. How they are automating the entire experience of capturing awareness and investing all of their efforts into what they call systems of engagement.

No longer can we plan for what we will sell, but we need to listen and interact with the consumer to find out how we can help, and much of the time this won’t be through the direct conversations we have, but through exploiting, for lack of better term, what they are telling us through the information that already exists.

Now, I realize that new ways of approaching customers and systems of engagement may not directly correlate to commercial integration, but there is a parallel here. Everything will be different, from the way we find our customers; to the way we keep them. And what we are selling them has to change to.

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