Image Gallery: Precon Day at Channel Partners Evolution 2019
What a start to Channel Partners Evolution!
In what was without question the best preconference event we’ve ever hosted, sales and marketing expert Robin Robins challenged partners to make their businesses better, offering up the four foundational pillars of all great IT service marketing plans. She spent most of Monday afternoon on stage delivering important information that partners of all types can take home and apply to their businesses. It was sponsored by Dell Expert Network.
But we were just getting started.
The Robin Robins Workshop was followed by the traditional Alliance of Channel Women ACWConnect Live networking event and program, which featured keynote speaker Risha Grant. Grant told those in attendance how we can all embrace diversity in the workplace to change our companies, communities, country and world for the better.
The evening wrapped up with our First-Time Attendee Reception, sponsored by Verizon. Channel Partners newbies and invited guests packed the Dignitary at the Marriott Marquis, the host hotel, for networking and to meet other Evolution first-timers.
Scroll through the gallery below before you head out to today’s activities!
Esteemed sales and marketing expert Robin Robins, who has helped thousands of MSPs and IT service providers improve their businesses, took to the Channel Partners Evolution keynote stage for an afternoon of great advice for partners.
Her presentation had an ambitious goal: to help partners double or triple their number of quality managed services clients in the next 12 months.
The session, sponsored by Dell Expert Network, offered advice to command premium fees and raise prices without pushback from clients, and for partners to take control over their businesses by making them profitable, stable and fun.
No surprise to see a great turnout for the Robin Robins Workshop.
In the nearly four-hour session, Robins offered a bevy of important sales and marketing information, including characteristics of productive, effective marketing for MSPs and IT service providers. Among them: attracting the right prospects; delivering measurable results; and judging success based on results, not opinions.
The partnership between Channel Partners and the Alliance of Channel Women continued Monday night with the organization's ACW Connect Live! event, which brings together members of ACW and their guests for networking, awards and more.
ACW's guest speaker, Risha Grant, encouraged ACW attendees to embrace diversity.
In an important message to everyone in attendance, Grant said we all need to overcome "BS," or bias synapse, which makes us judge others simply based on appearance or how they are different from us. In business, doing so could keep them from assimilating to company culture, or, on the flip side, not allow their individuality to thrive.
Diversity is not only race and gender, which dominate today’s headlines, Grant said, it's ethnicity, religion, politics, socio-economics, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, personality and ability. Each offers a different life experience, a different point of view, a different way of doing things.
After Grant's presentation, women leaders from Sprint, Telarus, CenturyLink and MicroCorp got on stage to talk about what their companies are doing to encourage inclusion.
Preconference Day closed with an amazing turnout at the Dignitary inside the Marriott Marquis for the First-Time Attendee Reception.
Agents, VARs, MSPs, consultants and more making the first visit to a Channel Partners show got a chance to mingle, network and have some appetizers and drinks.
Verizon sponsored the event.
That's Dave Longo (left), director, North American channels at Verizon Business Markets, on stage with Thomas Baker, Channel Partners' director of sales.
The two welcomed folks to the First-Time Attendee Reception.
