I was having lunch with an old friend the other day when I mentioned what a great response I'd had to the recent articles I've been doing on US and UK sales. The friend in question just happens to be the man who employed me in my last stint in the UK channel, and he was interested to know more. He has since left the same company that I worked for and started again, doing it his way.
He mentioned to me that the channel seemed to be getting very stale for a lot of the smaller technologies, which is why he started small again. My mind flashed through a thousand posts at once and suddenly everything seemed to make sense.
I've bemoaned the fact that security is stagnating here before. Richard Stiennon took me to task for it, and even compared me to Mike Rothman, which was very hurtful (joke Mike!). I remember thinking at the time it was unfair, because whereas Mike had been pontificating a bit, I was genuinely struggling to see where we would go next as a reasonably sophisticated market started to dig its heels in.
I spoke to another friend of mine from the same distributor not long ago, and he practically whined that no-one was buying anything. He blamed everything from sub-prime mortgages to the exchange rate to Gordon Brown, which no doubt all have their faults, but I'm pretty sure stuff is still being sold. I'm so busy personally that I can't even arrange a doctor's appointment to fix my DVT. We have a great product and a really good team in the UK, but that doesn't mean we created a market from nothing. The opportunities are out there, you just have to stand out from the crowd.
Tomorrow I'll be covering what we talked about in more detail, and yet another view of the channel.
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