Specialty AV Buying Groups Show Urgency in Devising Methods to Lure Traffic

Home Technology Specialists of America (HTSA) just completed a three-day event dedicated to marketing, its second since Bob Hana became managing director. The No. 1 area of concern for Hana is that “where our customers are is very different today than where they were five or six years ago,” he told Consumer Electronics Daily. Then, customers were drawn to stores to look at what where then cutting-edge flat-panel TVs, but in the specialty channel, “it’s not a store-traffic kind of thing anymore,” Hana said. “We need to find [customers] where they are since they're not coming in the way they used to,” he said.

There are similar concerns at Azione Unlimited, where marketing is one of five committees solidified last week to take the buying group to the next level, President Richard Glikes told us. “Marketing has been a real shortcoming of our type of dealers,” said Glikes, whose member roster is predominantly made up of custom installation companies. Glikes estimated that only 10 percent of Azione members “have websites worth viewing.” For the most part, he said, dealers “sit in their foxhole and pray for referrals.” Glikes said there are “myriad opportunities” to create new business if dealers combine resources “and make them interoperable.” At the group’s September meeting in New Orleans, he'll present Azione’s plan to underwrite a framework of marketing-driven websites that dealers can “opt in or opt out of.” Dealers who opt in will pay an additional $200-500 a month for the extra services, he said. The group is being chaired by Will Pisula, general manager of Encore Audio Video, Portland, Ore.

Hana of HTSA said the customer base for specialty AV remains strong but the means to reaching them has changed, and the buying group is looking for ways to find customers through Internet search tools, by repurposing marketing materials, events and education. “We have a lot to learn,” he said, which is exacerbated by how marketing needs are “changing daily.” The transition from what dealers have done in the past with marketing through print, radio and TV ads has been “rapidly changing as fast as the adaptation of people searching on their smartphones for everything on the planet,” he said. “We're trying to enable our members with the knowledge, the tools and the comfort level” to adapt the new approaches and drive demand, he said.

One goal of the HTSA marketing summit was to have manufacturer marketers engage with one another and build relationships that might lead to future associations, Hana said. Buying groups typically involve networking among company executives at the upper levels, but Hana wants to encourage interaction at the sales and marketing level “where the work really gets done,” he said, jokingly. “Relationship-building on that side is unique,” he said.

Hana also encouraged dealers to participate in social media regardless of their personal opinions toward Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. It doesn’t matter whether dealers or marketers use Facebook in their personal lives, he said. What’s important is that “your customers are,” he said. Dealers and marketers need to be engaged in social media today, he said, and to dedicate resources for it. Social media “does need to be done today, and it requires time and dedication,” he said.

Another takeaway from the summit was the need for a change in how dealers communicate with customers, Hana said. “When we look at how we address the customer, we in the industry talk in our own jargon,” he said. “Our clients don’t talk like that.” When they search for a product or capability they'd like to have in their homes, they don’t look for terms such as “home control,” he said. “They're searching for ‘how do I turn my lights on automatically?'” he said. “We're so intent on that in conversations with consumers -- and in conversations with architects and the design community -- that we need to understand their perspective more and talk like they talk,” Hana said. “We don’t make any sense to them.”

Choosing a better way to communicate extends to search optimization and ad words, Hana said. Dealers need to “get out of their space” and into consumers’ space “to understand what they're really looking for so we can relate better to everybody,” he said. People tend to do Google searches in terms of solving a problem or finding a solution to something they're looking for, he said. “I'm not necessarily looking for this part for my car,” he said. “I'm saying that my car doesn’t run.” He encouraged dealers to think along those lines when using search optimization tools. “Dealers need to think in laymen’s terms about what a customer’s problem is,” he said. An exercise at the summit asked participants to write down the three things retail salespeople say customers need or ask for the most. A customer might ask for “better remote control, when we're thinking home automation,” he said. The message extends to dealer newsletters, Hana said, saying dealers need to improve the content of their newsletters to make it more relevant to the audience.

On whether HTSA will raise dealer member dues to support the increased marketing efforts, Hana said, “Not yet.”

At Azione, meanwhile, the group has established four other committees in addition to marketing, according to Glikes. A metrics group, headed by David Daniels, co-CEO of Xssentials, Aspen, Colo., will be responsible for measuring where Azione dealers have success and don’t, Glikes said. Dealers have a tendency to “do a lot of things and never go back” to measure performance, he said. By tagging sales, the group can “grasp trends quicker and look for profit possibilities more effectively,” he said.

On the operations side, Eric Bodley, general manager of Perfect Path, will lead the committee charged with finding a software program that all dealers will use “to make it easier to look for results,” Glikes said. “There’s no downside to all being on the same operating system,” he said.

For training, Glikes will partner with David Chace, president of Training Allies, to develop training resources for Azione Unlimited University, the group’s online training center where training materials for all brands will reside, Glikes said. With easy access to training materials, dealers can quickly gain the selling skills to “raise the close ratio,” he said.

The purchasing/forecasting committee, chaired by Kevin Lambidonis, CEO of DES, Rogers, Ark., has the goal of delivering more efficient forecasting that leads to economies in purchasing and improved margins, Glikes said. “One of the best things we can do for vendors is to have clean inventories,” Glikes said, “and the best way to do that is to forecast.” Custom dealers know what they're going to sell six months to a year down the road because projects are spec'd that far in advance, he said. “That information could be sent to vendors so they know what we have to have on hand,” he said.

Glikes is still looking at a private-label model for Azione dealers (CED July 26 p1), where customers wouldn’t be able to price-shop products such as speakers or accessories and margins could be more attractive. He gave as examples of vendors that are the type Azione would approach Sonance, Triad and SurgX, but said nothing has been developed yet. Once the group hits 100 dealers, “we'll start that initiative,” Glikes said. Azione just added its 72nd member, Lifestyle Electronics, Park City, Utah, he said. Glikes expects Azione to top 100 dealers next year, he said.