Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Preday is in the books and I have to say it was better than I expected it would be. Compared to last year the keynotes were disappointing, but I’m not the keynote kind of a guy so you can take that with a grain of salt; I just found the content last year far more interesting, valuable and meaningful and Warrilow keynote was easilly the best. The only bright spot to break up meaningless keynotes were hilarious infomercial introductions for the speakers, sort of poking fun back at the keynote idea all together. Anyone taking bets to see if Eric Ligman was behind the production of these?

Click to watch the SMB Symposium Infomercial Videos (17mb, wmv only)

(don’t get me wrong, I understand the keynote concept and I appreciate why they do it – this is a showcase event and there are always those 20% of people that have been under a rock. They came to this event to catch up because they haven’t had the time or interest to keep up with the technology or Microsoft isn’t a big enough of a partner to warrant the focus. However, and specifically for the SMB sector, I feel its ones professional duty to stay on top of the technology news, training, etc…. and for 80% of us that made the trek and took a week off from our duties I would rather have spent all day in the side sessions)

Lunch was pretty cool as well. Each table had a specific discussion subject so you could sit with your peers that were interested in the same subject you are. Dave Sobel and I sat at the Giving Good Customer Service table simply for the irony showcase but I will admit that in the discussions between him, Susanne, Robbie, Tim and a few others I did pick up some things that we will be implementing soon at OWN – nothing earth shattering or life changing, but service is about the details and the more you can pick up and bounce off your peers the better off your stuff comes out.

Speaking of Side Sessions

Even better than last year and there was an official networking lounge. I hopped back and forth between a few of them because I didn’t want to miss as many as I did. I watched the presentation on the ResponsePoint VoIP solution from Microsoft, I went to the Exchange 2007 one, I sat through the entire presentation Susanne Dansey did and went back and forth through a few others all of which were spectacular and I wish I could have been in all of them at the same time. But what can you do.

Skip this part if you’re not into Susanne Fan Club stuff. With as many conferences as I’ve been to there is always that one person, that one presentation or that one conversation that basically pays for your trip. Susanne’s presentation on customer service was easilly it. I can go home now. It was funny, it was on the point but more importantly it really helped me put into perpective how to deal with difficult people. Thankfully, most of our business is with partners and I have to admit that they are all pretty much wonderful and understanding… but customers. Ever look at the phone and think to yourself – “Do I feel like having my day ruined by this person, again?” – Susanne’s presentation gave me some insight to how to fix that and how to do a little bit better with this particular pain point. Just like Warrilow’s presentation, it addressed the current pain point and gave me something I never got from my business books.

(sneak peak: it’s ok if you don’t believe me; I recorded the entire presentation and will make it available to Susanne to do with what she wishes. For now you’ll have to take my word for it, this was about as good as it gets)

Local Representation

All my local Microsoft people are here. All except The Greg Boyd, best sales person on the face of the earth. I wrote about this earlier, but Jessica Emmons, James Cuomo, Rene Alamo, JJ Antequino… everyone seems to be here. Why is this relevant? Because I do business with these folks year round and I rarely get to see them, once a quarter if I’m lucky and the calendar matches up. But while I am here I get to hear what their plans for the year are, what they will and wont likely have the chance to do – and I can plan my local market engagements based on that as well as the community aspect. For most SMB partners whose engagement is 100% local I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t show up for at least one day.

Networking

Aside from the brief moments of Susanneshine, these conferences are far more about networking, exchanging ideas and partnering than they are about presentation content and keynotes. This year the SMB Symposium dedicated a cool room just for this. Tables, couches, drinks, etc. This is incredibly valuable for me because I partner with a lot of these folks and we generally don’t get to sit down and talk about the good, the bad and the ugly. The ugly is what I really need to know because the products and services we deliver are selling like crazy so addressing the problems and issues we are not aware of is critical. Also finding out how to make those products and services work better for our clients is incredibly important because it drives the feature set based on the actual users needs. It also helps to show some… uhm… pride… in what you do and really try to find the best solution or at least a good compromise. Kudos to the Symposium folks for arranging this.

Thats not the Opportunity I smell…

Overall, the venue was better, the organization was awesome, the discussions, presentations, networking opportunities and everything else was just executed perfectly. And if you wanted to talk to a vendor, you could. Nearly all the partner/customer facing people from the companies most of us do business with were present at this event and I even got to chat with Augie Gonzales from Citrix. There was no push, there was no stunt, there was no cattle driving – just networking with other respected professional in this business, regardless of the segment that they were in. I hope other conference organizers pick up on this suttle thing – vendor participation shouldn’t be about booth babes and big bright signs because SMB ITPRO folks are savvy and most of the time sales oriented as well. The little gimmics that get pulled at trade shows don’t really work up here – I mean thanks for the tshirt and all but I’m looking for something to help me serve my customers so lets talk about how we do that.

In the end, thats what SMB Symposium did (at least for me) and thats why I urged you folks to give it a chance.