A new perspective: it depends on whether you are holding or pouring.

An Engineers perspective. On Earth the glass is totally full, half with water, half with air.

If the client wants a dishwasher guy to hook up his Bose system... all well and good.

If the client wants Bose then I will recommend the dishwasher repairman to hook it up and avoid having my companies name associated with Bose products

shortbus,
you are doing just what I would do, corncob or no.

I AM having fun doing this, and I am willing not to take the lead given me by my AVAD salesman, something to the effect that "XX Billion dollars in Bose is being sold, and either you can get in on it or you can keep preaching the stuff you preach, where you make a lot less money." If I were in this strictly to make money, I doubt that I would ever write a single post. I would sure read them and use all your efforts, though!

We're off the topic now....

Sonance wants to grow, and that is a good thing for them. Maybe we are all just voicing our frustration at having to face change again. Sonance's introduction of these other lines, and their blithe dismissing of how our work has contributed to their success, is galling. Oh, well; as mentioned above, there are other lines to have and we do not sell exclusively by name brand. In fact, often our selling comes down to the old car salesman's standby phrase: "Trust me!" Except that we usually deliver and deliver well!

<< I am willing to not take the lead given me by my AVAD salesman, something to the effect that "XX Billion dollars in Bose is being sold, and either you can get in on it or you can keep preaching the stuff you preach, where you make a lot less money." >>

Good for you. I have heard the above sermon from reps beore. The fact is our company does not make less money by not supporting Bose. Bose is so over distributed that the margin suffers greatly. I can spend just a few minutes with a customer pointing out the advantages of Paradigm or B&W over Bose and end up making about 20% more margin - and give the customer better speakers too. Now if I lost a lot of sales to Bose I might think differently, but I don't.

If I factor in how many more Bose speakers I would have to sell to make up for the loss of margin, I am doing better to avoid Bose.

I have also found the AVAD sales reps to be very nice, but not very knowledgable about products they represent. Also, when you ask AVAD for a selling price, AVAD will always quote dealers the higher "suggested retail," a price at which no one sells, to make their margins seem higher. For example, they will tell you the Sharp Z-10000 projector retails for $11K when NO ONE has ever sold one for more than the $10K minimum resale price.



This message was edited by sndtowne on 09/02/03 18:54.

I’m not a BOSE dealer but my understanding is that BOSE offers dealers excellent margins, which is one of the many reasons they (BOSE) do so well – dealers love to sell it. And they are quite famous for have a pricing structure which does not allow dealers to discount certain items – which is why you find the AM7 or whatever the current incarnation is called for exactly the same price at every dealer. At least that’s the way it used to be. Maybe a BOSE dealer can comment.

Oops... it's that Bose word again... didn't we beat that horse silly about a month ago?

I am one who slagged Bose with just about everyone else... By no means would it be my first choice but QQQ is totally right... Bose is NOT discounted and you DO keep margin in it. Although this is a customer viewable forum, I don't care whether I give it away or not. Bose is usually about a 35 point item... actually a good deal for a client. There are hundreds of better sounding speakers out there and almost any customer who gives a listen will agree. For those that don't... the marketing giant has done its thing and they can't be convinced otherwise. For those clients you either become a Bose dealer or you forget them... either way your business model will still work.

Maybe Sonance will be as big as Bose someday!

Agreed. Bose has a guaranteed fat margin, and a lot of its success in the trenches has to do with spiffs to salespeople. The salesman can sell you Bose and make more money than by selling you better stuff, but he doesn't have to go home with you and listen to it.


My AVAD salesfolks are people whom I have known for ten to twenty years in three different companies, and I have actually only heard this from one of them. Unfortunately, he was the one assigned to push the Bose. I haven't bothered to ask the opinions of others at the company, but I am sure they do not think any more of Bose now than they did before. Although they DID see Sonance as a big enough threat to them several years ago that they offered to buy our entire stock of Sonance if we would switch to XXXXX (left unspoken).

With all this slamming of Sonance, don't forget to let them know in person what you think of their move. CEDIA is the perfect place to let them know how we feel.

<< I’m not a BOSE dealer but my understanding is that BOSE offers dealers excellent margins, which is one of the many reasons they (BOSE) do so well – dealers love to sell it.>>

If dealers love to sell Bose, it must be primarily the mass market, regional chain store, and warehouse (Sam's) dealers. In an annual survey taken by the Inside Track, a sepcialty dealer newsletter, Bose is consistanty ranked either last, or second to last out of the top 19 to 20 brands. Also, I would not call 35 points "a fat (or excellent) margin."

reading all these posts, I am either missing one thing, or this is an even newer development...

have any of you walked into a CompUSA store lately?

Somewhere in the store, you are likely to find a posterboard with half dozen volume controls and speakers in it....the speakers are "HomeTech by Sonance"

did I miss it in this thread, or is this new?

avdude

Oh... you didn't hear?

COMP USA bought GOOD GUYS!

They have actually hired a guy up here who is about to enter hell (as I did by trying to get Good Guys Custom Insatll going up her in the NW). He is head of the COMP USA Custom Integration department.

They'll probably do OK in the computer end but trying to move a big corporation into custom install... well I could write a book and I won't start because I'm long winded enough anyway. Basically, my experience was that these big corporations move boxes... we do Construction. These two are inherently different and when you equate moving boxes with "Moving more amounts of construction" and your marketing plan is to get custom in front of as many people as possible by going after free satellite installs... failure is about 99.999999% certain.

This is not what I would consider a threat... just interesting info.

Also... my local AVAD dropped Sonance for Niles and I hear that the Niles-AVAD connection will be nationwide... anyone else?