Touchscreen technology has revolutionized the way we go about our day to day lives. From smartphones, to touchless applications to manage customer interactions, and even streamlining operations, touch screens are appearing more and more in our lives. With the Covid 19 pandemic accelerating self-checkout it does not appear that touch are going away.
We meet up with Bill Nulf a 20 year veteran in the industry as he shares what he is seeing in the industry and what is coming in the near future.
Video Transcription
Harry Brelsford
Hey, SMB Nation, Harry here and we've got a really interesting story about a product area you might not have thought much about. I'm with Bill Nulf. Bill, welcome. How you doing?
Bill Nulf
Doing well yourself?
Harry Brelsford
Good. Good. First of all, we're at Micro Touch What is it? What is your job and then we're gonna talk channels.
Bill Nulf
I lead the channel sales for Micro Touch. I've been with Micro Touch since January and have around 20 years in the touch industry. Now.
Harry Brelsford
Okay, okay, great. So So what? What does do what? What does the word channels mean to microtouch? And here's why I asked. When you go across different industries, it literally means different things might come from the traditional IT industry, the channel might be an MSP. What What does channels mean to Micro Touch? And what do your channel partners look like?
Bill Nulf
channels to me as we do your standard two tier distribution would be our channel, sell to distributors who sell to resellers, and then get it to the end customer. We utilize the channel as since this is relatively new, under the Micro Touch name for us, the channel is how we're getting to market right now. We will continue to add people but the channel is how we get there. And currently, we run through three distribution partners, and then we are working to build out you know the reseller relationships, because that's where, you know, the demand and the fulfillment really happens. So that's what our focus will be.
Harry Brelsford
So what I'm hearing is you may not have a direct Olympic metal channel partner program where I could sign up as bronze and earn my way to silver and become gold. But you'd rather go through your three distributors,
Bill Nulf
um, no, we are working on a program is going to call it the most valuable partner program and be okay with a football slant. We hope to launch that sometime in q4. And it will be geared towards the the traditional VAR, the value added reseller where we'll have programs in place to protect them for bringing business in. And because a lot of times, some of the smaller guys will go out and do all the heavy lifting and then maybe a large mail order company who doesn't need as much margin on the sale could end up losing it. So we want to help reward the people who do the lifting and help us get SPECT in
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, my career. So essentially in the channel via visa via the Microsoft partner program. Let's let's take a vertical that you serve, I understand you have a footprint in healthcare, what's what's going on in healthcare?
Bill Nulf
Well, health care,we are,we are just really approaching end to the healthcare, we have a handful of products that we want to start focusing on. And we really want to get with some of the bars that have healthcare focus programs. So or you know that they have the list of names of where to go. So Gene is working and his team on a product lineup for us. And we should have by the end of the year, probably half a dozen products that if you will, would be considered medical, whether some certifications, color, etc. But we are going to push into that market focused, come towards q4 and start up q1 next year. And that's you know, it's not our biggest market but we feel that there's a lot of opportunity there for us.
Harry Brelsford
Oh Absolutely. It's not going away. That's for sure. No. Final question would be there's winners and losers coming out of the pandemic. Not to sound like CNBC. Buthow did how did the pandemic to treat micro touch? What
Bill Nulf
I would think right now we're probably I think it's treated us better than most number one, we have our own factory and we build our products. So a lot of the people that we compete against us contract manufacturers, so when everybody's scrambling for components and stuff, it's nice that you have the ability to have your own factory and we leverage a lot of our OEM business Additionally, I think since there's not travel really and customers aren't being seen since we have a limited Salesforceit we're not you know, we're getting more even by using our distribution reseller partners. And because people aren't expecting you to be out calling on the end customer so i think i think we've done well the launch. Obviously we'd like not to affect COVID but I think the COVID situation taking all the negative stuff out of it is probably helped us more than it's hurt us.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, yeah. Good, good. Yeah. I I would offer and I was just thinking about this over the weekend, you know, just business and the, the pandemic and now we have the Delta variant. That's, you know, just the sort of like our at least the second wave as for a whole nother discussion of what wave we're in, but it has really changed how business works. And I was just, you know, looking at the touch screens literally over the weekend restaurant this that and the other and I I've just fundamentally changed my behavior on how I translate So, um, well there you have it. We'll keep up the good work.
Bill Nulf
Okay, well thank you for your time. All right.