I am back from a week-long visit to Delhi. In many ways, it’s not the Delhi I knew of a year ago. A couple of vendors have moved out of the city to the adjoining Gurgaon, a few of the senior executives too have moved on and those I have known from previous years have had so much more to share.
Until March this year, the 90-member PCAIT, the Progressive Channel Association of Information Technology, was merely a concept. It is now a registered society and meets every month, planning toward being the IT channels’s Nasscom.
It has a full-time executive secretary with no vested or conflicting interest in the form of a business like other members. His years of experience handling fair trade practices for a non-governmental organization could do even more to help. And unlike many other associations, what could make this work is an elite membership limited to an extent by the prohibitive admission and annual fees.
It may already have seen a bit of conflict in the more than a year since the concept first took shape, but some things are going its way. It could learn from mistakes made my associations whose initiatives fell flat due to discontented members. Issues like defaults have now taken a somewhat lower priority, and many in the channel have begun to find solutions themselves to the eternal concern of shrinking margins (retail, business fundamentals). Trade bodies like Mumbai’s TAIT and Kolkata’s COMPASS may already be doing much of what PCAIT has laid down as objectives. And it’s high time an association in the capital got into the act.
A few other insights:
Pass on to your best employee of the year, the overseas trip or the plasma TV that you won from vendors/distributors for achieving targets.
Do not rely on vendors or distributors alone to create a market for new products, bring innovations in your own promotional activities.
Use industry figures and research data as nothing more than indicators and not the true picture.
Keep following up with those customers who have been postponing payment.