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Session Descriptions
Plenary Session: RSPA Shark Tank (Panel: Kevin Kogler, Luis Artiz, Velda Goodin, Marty Hodgett and Uwe von Serhwald): Step into the RSPA version of the TV show Shark Tank, presented by the STS Committee. While it’s not Mark Cuban and gang, you’ll find Committee Chair Kevin Kogler, and a panel including Committee members Velda Goodin, Luis Artiz and Uwe von Sehrwald, equally as compelling during this intriguing twist on the traditional industry panel.
Watch as RSPA member companies present their product/service in front of the “STS Sharks,” describing how their product or service uses technology to improve the shopping/purchasing experience for the end-user. Audience members will have an opportunity to share input, too. Grab a seat right after Monday’s networking lunch—this is sure to be a can’t-miss event!
Plenary Session: Industry Update (Presented by Bob Goldberg): The past year has seen significant changes in the POS world. Many of these have legal ramifications. Bob will bring you up to date on what has occurred and what is anticipated.
Plenary Session & Awards: This annual celebration is one of the highlights of RetailNOW. Recognizing the best of the industry, attendees will be able to cheer the announcement of RSPA’s 2017 Vendor of Excellence Award winners, see the recipients of this year’s Hall of Fame and H.O. Whistler Awards and applaud the work of this year’s Board of Directors
The ceremony will conclude with the passing of the gavel from RSPA Chairman of the Board, Tom Reichart, to the Incoming Chairman, Mark Fraker.
Stories from the Cloud: Selling to SMB (Panel: Jim Roddy, Alex Fala, Frank Caron, Josh Sullivan, Herman Man): As cloud solutions become the defacto for many SMBs, a new arm of the industry is being established, and with that comes new opportunities for VARs. Industry leaders chat with Jim Roddy about the opportunities to work with SaaS companies, how to better engage with SMB clients and open up new revenue streams.
Stories from the Cloud: Selling to SMB (Panel: Jim Roddy, Alex Fala, Frank Caron, Josh Sullivan, Herman Man): As cloud solutions become the defacto for many SMBs, a new arm of the industry is being established, and with that comes new opportunities for VARs. Industry leaders chat with Jim Roddy about the opportunities to work with SaaS companies, how to better engage with SMB clients and open up new revenue streams.
CNP vs. CP: How Mobility and Better Security Can Reduce Costs and Boost Your Business (Presented by Ben Wagner): Payment card fraud and high transaction fees are two of the biggest issues facing home delivery and out-of-store merchants, but what if I told you these specialty merchants can virtually eliminate those risks and cut payment card transaction fees in half with one simple change? The answer: Adopting a mobile point of sale (mPOS) strategy. This session will explore the benefits of transitioning CNP transactions to CP as well as how mPOS offerings are driving this revolution. Attendees will learn how specialty merchants can transform their business with mobility and improved security in order to provide better customer experiences, realize fast and significant return on investments, improve consumer loyalty, and – most importantly – drive sales.
How You Can Weather the Consolidation Storm (Presented by Matt Downs): The payment processor and acquirer space is very dynamic and changing rapidly. Disruptors such as the emergence of cloud technology and the continued commoditization of payments is leading to consolidation. A recent study revealed that nearly 2/3 of resellers saw less than 5% revenue growth in 2016. What does this increased competition mean for your business? In this session, attendees will get a broad view of the state of the industry backed by proprietary research and practical tips to help them thrive and grow their business.
POS Dealers as “Endless Aisle” Merchant Consultants (Presented by Tom McCole): How can dealers can profit from providing mobile/kiosk solutions to mitigate the severe regulatory and competitive threats that retailers, quick service and full service restaurants are facing? The session will help dealers understand how to provide “Endless Aisle” mobile technology consulting to businesses by adding mobile POS, order entry omni-commerce, e-catalogs, and digital signage for both customer engagement and unattended experiences.
Business Strategies for Today’s Reseller: How to revitalize your dealership (Presented by Michael Carey): Join this in-depth discussion on how resellers should better understand their customers so they can develop value-added services that will allow them to be provide more value and increase profitability. The presentation will cover the following topics: Understanding your business (what business are you in? Who is your customer? What do you sell? What is your competitive advantage?) Today’s Services (including Consulting, Project Management; Services; Call Center; Field Service; and Hardware Maintenance) and Marketing and Branding your service-based company.
Delivering on “Customer Experience” (Presented By Joel Doherty & Gregg Brunnick): We have entered a new economy…the experience economy. And it is changing everything. Customer personalization, a willingness to pay a premium for experience, omni-channel engagement. It’s a lot to consider for the brand we serve. To respond, ISVs. VARs and ISOs need to think about how the products and services you offer impact, contribute to and align with the customer experience. Join an in-depth discussion on how to position your solutions to respond to the experience economy and to drive a unique and meaningful brand/customer experience.
Meeting the Demands of Today’s Consumer (Presented by Henry Helgeson & Rachel Trueblood): Today’s consumer is more demanding than ever – demanding more flexible and speedy payments, a seamless journey between online and offline and greater convenience across the whole experience. Retailers and restaurants, both big and small, are struggling to keep up with these evolving demands and create a unified customer experience – sometimes to the detriment of their business.
We’ll present insights from our study on consumer needs and expectations and merchant preparedness for things like order online and pick up in store, in-aisle checkout and more – and how it can translate to incremental business for your merchants (and you).
You’ll hear what this means for the future of retail and payments and how any ISV and VAR can use this data to build relationships and deliver real value to their merchants. And how to think differently about point–of-sales and payments to go beyond the transaction to create a unified commerce experience to increase loyalty and customer satisfaction and grow their business and yours.
The Magnificent Margin Stack (Presented by Bruce Mann with Jami Interdonato): Build an offering for merchants that includes complementary product, each contributing margin dollars to the sale (including some that are aftermarket). Margin stack offerings could include liquor dispensing, video surveillance, payroll, cash management, gift cards, loyalty cards, loyalty programs, etc. Join this session to find out just how lucrative a well-constructed margin stack can be.
An Appetite for Apps: How Software is Radically Reshaping Businesses (Presented by James Cha, Daniel Hayes and Mark Schulze): Business owners are faced with tough decisions when evaluating the different apps on the market and the value they could bring to their business. The increased demand for convenience makes it difficult for SMBs to keep pace with large corporations while keeping within their budget. Even if their products or services are superior, they may lack the fiscal resources to meet this demand and surpass competition. VARs will hear how apps are giving small and medium-sized businesses the tools that corporations have had the advantage of using for years. Instead of using disparate platforms, SMB owners can now manage anything from employee scheduling, to loyalty programs, to accounting – all from one central location.
Digital Marketing Strategy – Digital Practices for Reaching Customers (Presented by Christy Thompson): This session will highlight some best practices and methods for creating a digital marketing strategy.
How to Prevent Your Customer from Being the Next Cybercrime Headline (Presented by Bill Black): Learn how to assess your and your customers’ information security risks, and how to take your assessment and turn it into a strategy to mitigate those risks by selling secure solutions. Develop an understanding of techniques to secure information assets. Learn how selling information security solutions is a cyclical cycle of assess, analysis, remediation, and repeat. There is no solution which is a one and done, the moment one stops assessing for security risks the more vulnerable your customer becomes day by day.
Benefits of Offering Wireless LAN (Presented by Duane Roebuck): Why should you offer WLAN? What are the benefits to adding WLAN opportunities to your cloud service offerings? How can you use EMV requirements to upsell for WLAN? There’s much for VARs to know in this often overlooked sales opportunity. Find out the basics of offering wireless LAN and get the information you need to begin to talk to merchants about what they should do if their internet goes down.
Wednesday, 8/9
W2W Community Event (Presented by Hilary Corna): Learn about the secret sauce of Toyota’s success, tricks to practicing empathy in the workplace, and how to empower it in others in the ever-changing industry of technology.
The Ins and Outs of Payment Facilitation (Presented by Holli Targan): Get educated on what a VAR, ISV and ISO can expect when exploring the possibility of becoming, and on being, a payment facilitator. There is much confusion and curiosity about taking advantage of the new payment facilitation opportunity. Companies are unclear about what a payment facilitator is, whether an entity should be one, and the associated responsibilities and risks.
Will You Be in Business 5 Years from Now? Not If You Don’t Make Changes Now. (Presented by Bill Bradley, Bill Draper, Jeremy Julian, Chris Rumpf, Jordan Thaeler): If VARs don’t keep pace with industry change they won’t have a business to change later. POS revenue streams are being upended with the undeniable shift to “cloud”, and there are only shrinking options for VARs to be successful. This is not a matter of IF but a matter of WHEN. If you think POS hardware, software and service prices will increase you’re sadly mistaken. Hear perspective from a Cloud ISV who doesn’t have a channel, and VARs who have successfully transitioned their businesses to keep revenue parity in a changing world. Additional Speakers: Bill Bradley, Bill Draper & Chris Rumpf
Hunter vs. Gatherer (Presented by Dan Brattland): Learn from a 30 year sales veteran in this hands on workshop for business owners, managers and sales professionals on developing a direct sales model that has proven results. The sales model was applied to a POS business that quickly became Dinerware’s #1 sales dealer within a year. The same sales model has been applied in a variety of value added products and merchant processing. Find out how to apply this model to your business, and see successful results.
The Next Generation in Payments: Properly Preparing for the Future (Presented by Jeremy Julian, Mike Wior, Matt Ozvat & Ryan Williams): How will the changing demographic of restaurant consumers today affect the decisions restaurant operators make in the next few years? With more and more consumers demanding ‘high tech’ payment options and with the threat of data growing every day, restaurant operators and the vendors that supply them are at a crossroads. What does the future of payment look like in restaurants, and how can VARs incorporate them into their product offering? How can VARs make product decisions today that will help future-proof their clients while delivering the security and convenience their guest crave?
How to Have Payments Pay Off (Presented by Paul Kirk): Help guide your merchant toward finding the right payment processor that will work with their technology and business using consultative selling techniques. This interactive course will be focused on helping VARs & ISVs work together to practice how they ask probing questions around payment solutions, and how they position payments. There will be instruction on consultative selling and how to see the ROI on positioning payments based on value opposed to price. The session will conclude with a game to determine who does the best in positioning payments in a way that creates value for the merchant.
Achieving an Optimal Outcome (Presented by Jeff Riley): After eleven years at the helm of Dinerware, an ISV in the restaurant POS market, Jeff Riley successfully negotiated and navigated the process of selling his company to Heartland Payment Systems in 2015. Jeff will present a blend of his own personal experiences selling Dinerware as well as Corum’s M&A best practices and deal disasters (pitfalls and things to avoid when selling your business). Jeff will also provide an overview of the current M&A climate in the retail technology market as well as discussing the Top 10 Disruptive Technologies and how they relate to the Point of Sale technology ecosystem, addressing questions such as “What type of company would buy my business?”, and “How much is my business worth?”
18 Ways Leading POS Resellers Provide Superior Value to Their Merchants (Presented by Jim Roddy): What do fast-growth point of sale resellers know that you don’t? They’ve developed a winning formula that consistently provides superior value to their merchant customers. Jim Roddy has engaged with these leading resellers during his 18 years in the POS channel, and in this special presentation he will share with you principles and tactics that will enable you to exceed client expectations. After Jim’s talk, you will fired up and ready to take on the challenge of providing superior value to your merchant customers!
Forget PCI: Help your Merchants Secure the Business (Presented by James Zou): Shift the focus of your PCI DSS Compliance programs for SMB merchants from compliance to security and achieve better compliance rates at the same time. Among SMB merchants, the general perception of PCI DSS compliance is, at best, a mandatory form they get forced to complete every year. Focusing on security as a foundation provides a more meaningful value proposition for merchants that resonates better with them than PCI DSS, resulting in higher engagement and, ultimately, a more secure merchant portfolio.
Transformation for the Cloud and IOT (Presented by Michael Fleetwood): This session will present how business and end users are preparing for the future of IT in the Cloud with the Internet of Things. The change from a traditional transactional world to a consumption model is changing the way we are selling, buying and consuming IT. The Internet of Things will create a huge scale of devices collecting data that must be stored, protected, managed and analyzed to make intelligent decisions for businesses and consumers.
Canadian Community Event: Coming Soon
Value-Added Solutions: The Key to Customer Retention (Presented by Patrick Turiano, Christina Ziegler, Brad Giles and Chas Gannon): This session will focus on the myriad of value-added solutions available to ISOs, ISVs, and VARs to help create the customer retention they covet. In the past, portfolio retention was only something that merchant acquirers had to worry about, but with the relatively inexpensive costs of POS systems, merchants can change POS providers just as easy. This panel will speak to the importance of diversifying the product offering and detailing real-life case studies of how those decisions have impacted their bottom line.
How to Get More MRR from Your Current Customers (Presented by Brandon Knight): Learn actionable tips and methodology that, if adopted, will allow you to add cloud & carrier services to your practice, strengthen the existing partnerships in your core business, and grow exponentially faster than the market. The VAR and Cloud and Carrier Services agent communities are converging at an unprecedented rate, revealing compelling opportunities to add high-growth, recurring revenue business that is complementary to their existing businesses. Learn how to easily make the pivot and enter this high-growth area and strengthen the existing partnerships in their core business.
PCI and the Qualified Integrator and Reseller (QIR) Program (Presented by Marc Bayerkohler): An overview of the PCI Council and the QIR program, which includes the roles and responsibilities of the Council, the Brands, as well as a description of what Qualified Integrators and Resellers are, and how they become certified.
Managing Payments – Sourcing Profitable Partnerships and Avoiding Pitfalls (Presented by Chris Dryden): Coming Soon
Business Builders: SMB Sales Growth Workshop (Presented by Mark Frasco): In this session, you will learn the essential building blocks of small-business growth. This workshop will send you home with the tools that you can easily install once you get home, building momentum toward a more consistent, predictable business growth model. Business growth has a lot more to do with process, than it does technique. You’ll learn:
- A fast-strategy process that will clarify your differentiators and ideal customer profile
- A simple relationship development and management rhythm
- The importance of keeping score and transparency
- The tools and building blocks to small-business growth
- A process approach to business growth
