I spent the day today at the CompuCom vendor fair in Dallas, TX.  CompuCom is one of Ipswitch’s sales channel partners, and the purpose of attending today’s event was to talk about Ipswitch File Transfer solutions with CompuCom’s team of account managers and sales representatives.

Today’s goal was to raise awareness, education level and excitement about  Ipswitch File Transfer solutions among CompuCom’s 130 or so software sales associates so that they, in turn, will proactively pitch our solutions to their accounts and ultimately close more deals.

I walk away having had dozens of conversations that align with our focus of solving real business problems.   The days of selling “feature feature feature” are over.  In past years, literally thousands of sales centered on a laundry list of features such as 256-bit AES encryption, FTPS, SHA-512 file integrity and administrative separation of duties.  Today, a large (and growing) number of sales conversations center on higher-level topics such as policy enforcement, risk mitigation, visibility into all internal and external file interactions, and how to give end users a simple and secure way to quickly transfer files with other people.

It was definitely a very worthwhile event to participate in and I believe that we successfully raised mindshare and interest level in our portfolio of secure managed file transfer solutions within CompuCom.  And it’s always nice to see some x-large belt buckles while hearing a few success stories from sales reps about how they recently closed some juicy deals.