What types of internal training initiatives do company personnel attend?

Comunale: If you think about the segments we are in — access control, video, intrusion, and sound and communication products — they are all low-voltage products. We spend as a company probably more than any other distributor on training our people in all the technologies. In any given week we are sending our people to manufacturer facilities to make sure they stay current on the latest technologies. That has been an ongoing focus of ours from when we first started out. This business is about your people and making sure you have the best people who can talk to the customers in the most educated fashion to make sure they don’t make a mistake when they are laying out their projects. That’s what keeps the customers coming back to us.

When deciding which new products/technologies to bring onboard, how do you strike a balance between building vendor partnerships and having a diverse product portfolio?

Comunale: Technology is going to seek its own course. We are going to have the technology and we are going to continue to invest where we need to. The one thing we’re not doing though is selling similar products. There are a lot of manufacturers that sell similar products, but we want to make sure we are not bringing in a lot of the same products that really have a hard time distinguishing themselves. We try to limit the amount of partners we are going to bring in. If you look at our line card, we are a significant distribution partner with our top 10 suppliers. What I don’t want to do is have [a roster of] top 40 suppliers that have the same exact product.

How is technology on the backend facilitating easier ordering, faster delivery, online account management, inventory management, etc.?

Comunale: We have a very robust online system. Every year additional business goes through our Web site. I think for the younger generation it will probably become more prevalent, but we still don’t see a lot of our customers placing orders on the Web. What we do see is we have a lot of traffic for customers checking pricing and inventory for particular items.

What market niches or products are you excited about?

Comunale: Obviously the IP video space is significant for us because we are finally in that space since the merger with Northern Video. We also recently signed an exclusive relationship with Yamaha, a high-end audio brand, which finally gets us into the audio space. We dabbled in that space for a while so now we are really rounding out our breadth of product offering from not only intrusion, high-end video and high-end audio products. You are going to us see through the balance of 2012 adding other niche brands that we need to round out our product offering. We’re into the layer-three switches that we need for IP. We touch every segment of the market so that we can take a dealer from a very simple security system to the very high end, including a several hundred thousand dollar IP video project that our high end integrators and electrical contractors rely on us for.

To what degree is has installation firm consolidation affected the distribution business?

Comunale: I’ve been in this business since 1985. If I looked at the space in 1990 or 2000 or 2010, the only companies that really change are the top five players in the industry. You have the very large companies that continue to consolidate themselves, but after that you still have tens of thousands of smaller contractors that operate in this space. There has been some consolidation but not anything more or less over the last several years that we’ve haven’t seen over the past 20 years. This is a very resilient group of customers. Obviously having the RMR gives them the leg up to compete even in a down market.

Tri-Ed is a big supporter of industry associations on a national and local level, both financially and personnel involvement. Explain the importance to the company for the active participation.

Comunale: The easiest thing to do is write the check, but that doesn’t bring you much value. You write a check, everybody comes back and wants more. What we have always found is let’s become active in the local association. It is a requirement of all of our branch managers. Find out what is happening within your community, find out what makes your dealers tick. Find out what are the pressing issues and get involved. That is really what we want our people to do. Where ever we have a location you will find that Tri-Ed/Northern Video is very active getting involved in the community. It has always been like that for the past 25 years. James [Rothstein], Steve [Roth] and myself have always been active members in the associations.

How do you attempt to differentiate? What are your most significant challenges in wooing dealers to become Tri-Ed customers?

Comunale: We are really the only distributor that has all of the high-end integration products. We can support a dealer from the very low end to the very high end across all segments of the space. We also have the most knowledgeable technical sales force to help the dealer continue to be successful. We also have the only industry rewards program, which is Great Expectations. We’ve been running that for the better part of five years.

Every month I send out a newsletter and part of it shows the longevity of the people at the company. It’s not uncommon to see people who have been with the company for five, 10, 15 years, going back to the original company, which excites me. We have very little turnover. The combination of the manufacturer partners, the training and having the right people really separates us from the IT distributor or the data distributor. The IT and the data distributors have the high-end products, but they don’t have the whole basket of goods like we do.

Rodney Bosch is Managing Editor for SECURITY SALES & INTEGRATION. He can be reached at (310) 533-2426.

 

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