Every now and then, you experience something that gives you an almost surreal flashback — the kind where you can hear or feel or even smell or taste a past moment in time. Take me, for example. Every time “Ice Ice Baby” plays on my Spotify feed, I can hear and see and smell the team bus from my junior high football days. If you’d ever been to one of these events, you could probably name the companies in attendance with your eyes closed. There was Oracle, SAP, Avnet, Arrow, IBM, Brocade, Cisco, etc. — and about a dozen vendors pitching software and services. But this conference had something different. It had Tiffani Bova as its lunch keynote, Gartner’s leading analyst on channel sales and marketing at the time. Tiffani’s focus on this particular day was the drastic changes taking place in the B2B IT space, where the Cloud and subscription economy were creating huge disruption. And, perhaps even more disruptive, was the change taking place in the buyer’s journey because of the growing impact of digital media, content marketing and the connected economy. It was just after I gave-up on my salad and moved on to my trusty conference sourdough roll that I sort of fell in love with Tiffani (I can say this now that she’s with Salesforce). Because it was at that moment that she told an entire audience of (excuse my French) “old school” channel folk that they and their partners needed to adapt — or…
Read More: Your Regularly Scheduled Channel Program Is Over
