Recently, CE Pro sat down and spoke with Greg Andrews, VP of Marketing + Sales, Legrand | AV Residential Solutions, to discuss how important brand education and interoperability is for dealers, its recent sales restructuring and more.
Legrand | AV and its family of brands seem to resemble the unified efforts of the company’s commercial brands. Did the commercial efforts influence the residential sales and marketing?
With a year of collaboration in the books on the commercial side, it only made sense to leverage the knowledge the commercial brands have gained since organizing their sales team and aligning their marketing efforts. A residential integrator can now have one account and a single customer relationship across all the Legrand | AV brands, as opposed to having to manage multiple accounts for multiple brands.
To do this we not only have our internal team but continue to partner with residential rep agencies to provide personalized service.
We have dedicated brand product marketing teams and a central marketing team primarily focused on bringing our nine brands together for easy access to tools, collateral, and coordinated efforts at trade shows, conferences, trainings, and events.
We’ve already tackled a residential landing page on legrandav.com, and now we’re launching the Legrand | AV Resi Sales Sync app.
How does the “Transforming Smart Homes Together” strategy help integrators?
This collaboration means residential integrators have a single source for the three major components of a smart home: infrastructure, networking and A/V systems. Besides having a one-stop smart home shop, integrators benefit from:
- Design services, such as the Luxul Customer Assurance Program, for robust network infrastructure.
- Field support and in-person training when a dealer enters a new product category.
- Builder demand generation, with a specialized team creating specifications and pull-through for our installation partners.
- Expert technical support across a variety of product areas.
- Strong training teams and design services backed by online training, collateral, tools, and configurators.
- Smaller territories that allow more frequent contact and better service, with territory sales managers who live in the markets they serve.
How important is brand education, and interoperability, for dealers?
Knowing how the brands work together is essential to specifying properly, and it’s our job to make sure dealers understand it.
Not only do we have a hands-on sales team for whom training is part of the job, we also have a dedicated training team that can both educate about individual product brands and provide broader solution training on how those products complement each other.
Can you briefly explain some of the recent sales restructuring?
Recently we segmented our sales department into teams. Channel sales, account sales and solution sales each have their own focus, but the teams work together to make working with Legrand simple for channel partners, buying groups, and integrators. VP of sales and industry veteran Kevin Hansen leads the Channel Sales team, which is focused on key distributors, specialty retailers and strategic resellers.
Channel Sales coordinates distributor activity with 20 territory sales managers on the Account Sales team to increase frequency of touch. The idea is to make it simple for the territory sales managers to engage with authorized distributors.
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VP of sales Alex Weaver — who is about to attend his 20th CEDIA show this year — leads the Account Sales team, which is there to help buying-group dealers grow their businesses. The team encompasses territory managers and sales directors, whose focus is on domestic sales.
Finally, VP of sales and industry veteran Dave Keller heads up the Solution Sales team, [which] gives integrators a single point of contact to get the advice they need, from the initial project consultation and system design to completion.
