“We talked to nearly everyone at the show” said Rob Hunt, Hycomp Area Sales Manager, “And we were happy to attend the 2012 AICD, it is always a great show to be part of.”
Four members of our sales team represented Hycomp at the 27th Annual AICD (Association of Independent Compressor Distributors) Membership meeting in Florida: Ken Schiefer – Eastern US Area Sales Manager, Marty Malzahn – Sales & Marketing Manager, Freda Lasley – Sales Coordinator and Rob Hunt – Western US Area sales Manager. Each Hycomp team member agreed that the overall feel of this year’s AICD was a little different for Hycomp, Ken explains, “There really was not much general conversation about our product, it seems people are starting to really understand what Hycomp does and the products we offer. This year’s individual discussions seemed to all be centered on business.”
Through interaction at the AICD meeting and other communications with our distribution network we are finding that there is a strong desire to learn more about the applications where Hycomp compressors and boosters apply. Our distributors want to specifically know where to look for Hycomp sales and our training videos and other materials are covering that.
Hycomp has a new booth setup, which got several accolades from folks while at the show. Included as part of that booth, we use a flat screen LCD TV to display either a photograph slideshow presentation or in this case, a recorded power point sales training presentation. Rob and Ken both utilized the short 10 minute video to explain to distributors how Hycomp can more effectively train their entire sales staff and how this short video presentation can be used internally by their team.
The seminars at AICD were fantastic. Every member of the Hycomp team had great things to say about the seminars and were especially impressed with a presentation given by Bill Scales, which was titled: The Future of Distribution. Bill expounded on the wants, needs and fears of distributors and also talked about what manufacturers should be doing for their distributors.
Loyalty from manufacturers to distributors was a big topic of discussion during the entire weekend. It is always an important topic to us here at Hycomp as well. In our industry we have recently seen a little bit of a trend in which some manufacturers are cutting distributors out by selling direct to the customer. We highly value our distributors and have even fought to protect them in numerous cases. “Trust… It’s What We Build” is not just some sort of warm fuzzy slogan or tag line we use, we really believe in it and we take it very seriously. The trust of our customers and our distributors is paramount to our business plan. We thank our distributors for their continued partnership and we look forward to working with them, side by side, in the years to come.
CLICK HERE to see where Ken, Freda and Rob went on their way home from the 2012 AICD