The 500 biggest tech spenders: the exclusive Latin Trade annual ranking of the region's technology investment leaders

Latin Trade, June, 2003 by Greg Brown

Web-credible. E-mail and trade shows might sound more like marketing work, exactly the kind of effort that gets whacked when budgets are tight. But getting customers excited about your company pays dividends, if you can convince them the excitement is for real. "People, if they like a product, talk about it. That's valuable," says Price, at Concord.

Generating that buzz is sometimes a matter of offering something of real value to independent technology installers and their clients at corporations, the info-tech managers--training. American Power Conversion Corp., a maker of protected power supplies for corporate networks, cements the relationship with its integrators by staging what it calls city expos, training seminars throughout Latin America where managers take classes on installing and using products. "We put a lot of effort on training, on evangelizing these influencers," says Fernando Garcia, general manager in Latin America for American Power.

In a training session in Bogota in November 2002, American Power "certified" 15 companies to install its products, Garcia says. There are side benefits, of course, to providing free training--instant market research. Whoever takes off work to show up for training is almost certainly trying to get a project off the ground. "Two months after the presentation, we know every data center being built in Colombia," says Garcia.

Reaching influencers also means beating the bushes for trade press coverage, but the Internet is playing an important role--it's where tech customers spend their time, and it's very time- and cost-effective, says David Safeer, Latin America general manager for Iomega, a maker of data storage equipment for small, home office and medium-sized businesses. "The credibility of being online is using the medium they are talking about, and it spreads very quickly in that environment," says Safeer.

Getting current customers talking among their peers, turning them into unconscious influencers, is a big leg up for new products unfamiliar to tech buyers. "In network-attached storage, we find our first one or two customers are key customers, because they are going to influence [sales]," Safeer says. "Those first half a dozen customers in any country are definitely influencers."

As the tech world imploded at the beginning of the decade, disappearing companies and evaporating products became so common that distributors often needed to be reminded that tech suppliers continue to do business--witness the explosion in tech public relations, now somewhat on the wane. In the new world of quickly moving contracts and sometimes unintelligible software, however, decisions are moving from the CIO out to the middlemen. Reaching them, and their customers at Latin America, Inc., is the key to building the new tech fortunes.