You knew something was afoot when Michael Bridwell was willing to move from his native Georgia to Southern California and become director of commercial sales for Dana Innovations.
Those of us in commercial AV, having worked with Bridwell in his previous positions, had an inkling that Dana Innovations’ mostly residential integration market focused brands were probably expanding its commercial focuses significantly.
That has certainly proven to the be the case with its Sonance brand, which at ISE 2019 (Integrated Systems Europe) will demonstrate the Sonance Professional Series of 70V, 100V and 8 Ohm selectable in-ceiling, pendant and surface-mount speakers.
As hard as Dana Innovations has been working on the product development side to create audio solutions for today’s commercial applications, Bridwell has been working as hard behind the scenes on the company’s go-to-commercial-market strategy.
In an AV+ podcast conversation with CI editorial director Tom LeBlanc, Bridwell talks about what he’s been up to for the past nearly year-and-a-half during which he’s had a lot less face time with the commercial integration community.
Building Dana Innovations’ Commercial Market Strategy
Dana Innovations, which boasts an army of dedicated residential market sales reps, seems to understand that the commercial market is a different animal. Hiring Bridwell was a big step toward addressing that.
“We’ve had to build out an entire national structure,” he says on the podcast. It turned out that some of the residential reps in place already had strong commercial market command. Some would need to be augmented.
“We needed to do a full review of everybody we had as far as partners in each territory across the country and then abroad across the world,” Bridwell says.
Meanwhile, he created custom programs for commercial sales and studied pricing strategies. “I think people will be surprised about where we are pricing ours compared to our performance,” Bridwell says.
Michael Bridwell Is Left Speechless, Quite Literally
It was important to record the AV+ podcast sooner than later because having a conversation with Bridwell was to become a lot more challenging.
Earlier in January, he underwent a procedure to address an issue with his vocal cords that he said would “cause me to go into a semi-monastic mode” and that he would not be “able to actually vibrate my vocal cords for seven days during the healing process.”
Talking is a big part of Bridwell’s work – and it took a toll on him.
“If you’ve talked to me over the last couple of years — especially at InfoComm, ISE or CEDIA — you’ll know that my voice has varied,” he says on the podcast. “I’ve talked myself into what the surgeon is calling a major trauma. It’s going to be fine.”
So the AV+ interview with Dana Innovations’ Michael Bridwell couldn’t come at a better time. While he’s resting his vocal cords, you can enjoy a recording of his conversation with Commercial Integrator.
