In Broadcast September 2012 - 32

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 12 - SEPTEMBER 2012

InREPLY
The VAR Network Limited, Owner and Managing Director, Phil Eade ﬁelds the InBroadcast questions…
Phil Eade, Owner and MD, The VAR Network

InBroadcast: What role does The VAR Network play in the broadcast industry? Phil Eade: We provide long-term marketing and regional sales services to suppliers to the broadcast and media sector. We become part of our clients’ teams and help them to grow their international business. Our engagements are typically one-year contracts for an agreed minimum number of professional services days per month. We are now into the ﬁfth year with some of our clients, which hopefully speaks for itself about the consistently high quality of service that we provide. InB: How is your company changing to meet client demands? PE: Each of our supplier clients has a unique value proposition with the products and services that they offer to the broadcaster or media organisation. The goal of our marketing and regional sales services is to help communicate these with value-based marketing and win incremental business for our clients through a network of Value Added Resellers (VARs). To achieve this, our services need to change to meet the speciﬁc and ever changing needs of each client, including launching new products or entering new territories. Some smaller clients want us to provide all their company’s marketing and manage their global sales channel. Other larger clients just want speciﬁc marketing deliverables fed into their current marketing mix, and/

or speciﬁc sales territories covered that their current sales team do not address. Throughout our engagements we regularly review our deliverables and performance with each client, and agree the priorities and next activities. We are therefore continually changing our services to meet our client’s changing demands. InB: What criteria does the market use to make decisions for your services? PE: As with all investments the decision by a supplier whether to employ our services is a balance of cost, likely return on investment and risk. To maximise the likelihood of increasing international sales, a supplier needs suitably experienced and skilled sales and marketing professionals. To employ such personnel full-time is expensive and high risk, particularly in the current economic climate. Employing our services brings the needed experience and skills into a supplier’s team on a part-time basis for an agreed period. This is a lower cost approach (including all expenses associated with developing an international sales region shared with other suppliers), with a high chance of success (due to value based marketing and our established relationships with a wide network of VARs). InB: Which territories are showing particular activity? PE: When we travel our sales territory we typically meet with multiple local

resellers on each country visit. It can sometimes be surprising to hear feedback from them on the state of the same local broadcast market. One reseller may have a strong vibrant sales pipeline and another no opportunities to discuss. This is not just down to the products that they are representing, nor the capabilities of the reseller. Experience has shown us that matching the right supplier with the right reseller is critical, as is how the relationship is managed. Any supplier can build-up a list of resellers to cover a territory, but are they achieving the sustainable sales growth needed? We are achieving sales for our clients across Europe where we are proactively managing good ﬁt supplier-reseller relations. Making this match and providing the VARs with the right marketing tools is what we do. InB: Any innovations ahead that you can discuss? PE: Each of our clients are highly innovative, and we take pride in helping communicate their value proposition with our marketing services, and take the product to market with our regional sales services. If you want to talk innovations ahead, take a look at our current clients. The new BORNEO solution from Media Alliance which was previewed at IBC is leading the market for cloudbased media asset management. The OASYS Automated Playout software demonstrated at IBC continues to be generations ahead

of the competition. The Disk Archive Corporation with their ALTO Content Library archiving solution, proving that there is a more cost-effective method to archive broadcast media than tape libraries. Or Evoxe who demonstrated their NIS4 newsroom solution capability to operate simultaneously both rundown and story centric workﬂows to rapidly deliver news stories over television, radio, web and mobile. These companies continue to develop innovative solutions that really are leading the market in terms of workﬂow and functionality. InB: Give some examples of your services in action. PE: Our current and past client list includes Blue Lucy Media, Broadcast International, Digimetrics, Disk Archive Corporation, Evoxe, Media Alliance, OASYS Automated Playout, RT Software, S3 Satcom, Telemetrics and VidiGo. To these we have delivered marketing services for website design and text, electronic invitation design and distribution, corporate and solution brochures, exhibition booth signage design and text, animated online ads, concepts for printed ads, and case study interviews and preparation. For many of these, and for other clients, we have set-up reseller networks across Europe, and helped managed these to achieve incremental sales for our clients. InB: Thank you for taking time out to answer our questions. ■

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In Broadcast September 2012

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