Full Circle With USA TODAY

The USA TODAY was first published the year after I graduated from college. I was excited about it because one of our university's visiting instructors John Seigenthaler, publisher of the Nashville Tennessean at that time and a member of the Gannet family of newspapers, was the USA TODAY's first Editorial Page Editor. I also liked the concept of taking the headline news from each state, and laying that out in a full page spread. I had an inspired idea to see the same thing done for international news--a country by country news summary--and even applied for a position at the paper.

Review of HoverCam Mini, May 1,
2013 USA TODAY. We even shared
the stage with Mel Brooks &
Carl Reiner.

Although I never worked at "the nation's newspaper" it has always held a special place in my conscience, and each time I see the paper on display or pick up a copy to read I pause to give thanks to John Seigenthaler, who was such an inspiring, thoughtful guest lecturer and seminar leader on Duke University's campus, and to Professor Bruce L. Payne of Duke's Public Policy School, who organized the course on "Public Policy & The Media" and lured John to campus to share his experiences and wisdom. Bruce clearly deserved the "Teacher of the Year" award he received soon after.

We recently launched a new product (the HoverCam Mini) at our start-up company (the HoverCam). The first significant media outlet to properly test and review our product was USA TODAY. Technology reporter Ed Baig writes: "HoverCam Mini 5 is cool."  Life doesn't get much better than that. I've come full circle with USA TODAY.

Here's Ed Baig's video review of the HoverCam. The HoverCam material appears after the sponsored ad. Glad to see that the USA TODAY is finding ways to embrace new media to extend its advertising reach to stay in business.

Channel Tuneup: How Does Your Margin Motivate Channel Partners?

Does the margin of your product or service motivate your channel partners to sell more or less of your offering?

Balancing a vendor's desire to maximize profitability by not offering excessive margins to channel partners is countered by the desire to see those same partners increase the company's sales and profitability. Finding the right balance is an art, but not rocket science.

Vendors prepare for BETT 2012, world's
 largest education technology exposition
held in London.  If your company markets
 to schools, BETT is a must attend
trade show.

On a trip to the UK in January  I met with several distributors and VARs attending BETT, the world's largest education technology exposition. One of them was Sigma Software Distribution, a value added distributor (VAD) of software.  By VAD, I mean more than just a "box mover," a distribution partner that develops markets for their suppliers' offerings. As such, VAD's, because of their higher operating costs promoting products and creating markets, require a higher margin than mainstream distributors such as Ingram Micro, Tech Data and Computer 2000. Sigma recounted the story of one vendor that offers 5% margin on its line of software products. Sigma, which likes the software in question because it offers real benefits to endusers, reluctantly decided to represent that product line as a "loss leader" to service its reseller accounts, "but could you imagine how much we could sell if they provided us a better margin and we pushed it?" they ask. They don't push it (which requires investment). They only fulfill orders when asked.

On the one hand, a software publisher can marginally increase its revenue and profitability in the short term raising a distributor price and lowering distributor margins to 5%.  On the other hand, how much is the publisher foregoing by not providing its international value added distributors with margins that would motivate them to proactively push its software?

Finding the right margin may be an art, but not an impossible task. From my observation of this case, given the genuine interest of the UK distributor, the software publisher could significantly increase its revenue by giving its reseller strategy a tuneup and to provide margins that motivate channel partners to proactively sell.