A Smart Deal

Industry leaders offer expert advice to distributors to succeed in the smart home market.

18:28 04 April 2017

Distributors, who are recognised as champions of virtual inventory, have to embrace the smart home markets to meet growing demands. As this is an emerging technology and is, for many, an unchartered territory, industry leaders offer insightful expert advice to help you easily wade your way through it.

 

Dennis Holzer, executive director, PowerHouse Alliance

 

"Every once in a while a product innovation causes a ripple effect in determining the next generation of products across the industry. Voice control is the latest technology proving to be a game-changer for CI dealers. My advice to dealers is to embrace voice control and ensure you have the right product mix, knowledge and expertise to sell and install these control systems and compatible devices."

 

Seth Evenson, customer experience management director, AVAD

 

"We’ve partnered with recognized smart-home brands, such as Nest, August, iDevices and Lutron, to give our dealers access to the most reliable, sought-after brands in the industry.

Beyond that, our knowledgeable staff is on hand to help dealers navigate the integration of smart home products, as well as help dealers stay in front of the industry trends. Our advice to dealers is the use these emerging trends, such as home automation components, as opportunities to return to previous customers with innovative, feature-rich solutions — it’s a great follow-up opportunity and potential new sale."

 

Jack Halperin, senior VP, dealer channel sales, Almo

 

Dealers can take advantage of this growing trend by predominately calling out those web-enabled features that are already available today. Most major manufacturers offer several Wi-Fi-enabled appliances that let you pre-heat your oven while you are driving home or self-diagnose an error code to eliminate a service call, for example.

 

Controlling appliances from a smartphone is already here and will be of interest to millennials as they begin to reach home buying age.