Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/762735
34 The PCB Design Magazine • December 2016 well as your own. We've seen countless times where companies try to hire resellers and strong arm them to sell certain products that are not really a fit with the resellers business model. In the end, both the reseller and the OEM lose out. Having direct sales, whether telesales or field direct, saves you the margin you would normal- ly pay to a reseller and gets you closer to the customer. However, managing a hybrid chan- nel typically requires focused channel manage- ment to avoid conflict between your direct and reseller channels. Shaughnessy: How do you identify potential cus- tomers? And what is a typical timeframe for mak- ing a sale? Almeida: Our customer acquisition is largely done through outbound marketing activities. DownStream in particular has the benefit of having a product with very strong brand recog- nition which helps pull customers in. For our products and price points, sales cycles can range from 1–3 days to 1–6 months. Shaughnessy: DownStream is kind of a different animal, because you don't have any direct compet- itors. Still, you're asking designers to add another step to their process. How do you make your case to designers? Almeida: DownStream provides CAM verifica- tion and documentation solutions. Neither step is a new, additional step per se. It's really the use of automation to drive that step. Designers use our products for CAM file ver- ification. From easy netlist comparison to more specific DFM detection. This has always been part of the PCB post processes but was largely a manual effort using human optics to detect issues before going to manufacturing. It's only natural that with more complex PCB topologies that optics would need to be replaced with au- tomation. And now with shrinking product life- cycles, ensuring manufacturability on the first pass is becoming very import for companies to realize a return on investment in shorter time frames. Almost every design requires some level of documentation to fabricate and/or assemble the PCB. These are the instructions and specifica- tion for fit and finish of the product as intended by engineering. When documentation is vague or unavailable from engineering, it typically has to be documented further downstream in manufacturing. To ensure that product quality assurance is maintained both for the incoming bare PCB and other outsourced components, as well as the outgoing finished product. In both cases the customer must realize a certain amount of pain in executing these tasks to realistically justify purchasing software to solve those problems. Shaughnessy: How would you describe Down- Stream's marketing philosophy? Almeida: Because our products are sold to mainstream market, it typically means that the problems are well known and the solutions are proven. This allows us to avoid having to be evangelicals for our products. Instead, our philosophy is two-fold based on product and communication marketing. We typically try to make buying our products as easy as possible. Which means that our policies and configura- tions must be easily understood by the custom- er so that when working with our sales chan- SALES AND MARKETING WITH DOWNSTREAM