Last week, a few of us from our sales and marketing team attended MicroCorp’s One on One Partner Training event in Atlanta, Georgia. It was an exceptionally organized and executed event! It was also successful in bringing together partners and providers from various technical and business backgrounds to discuss the trends and issues of today for IT in the telecom and cloud space. Our team felt welcomed and important, and the venues, events, meetings, and sessions were all truly useful.

Here is a short recap of the week’s event and why we continue to be excited by this industry and by the partners we have chosen to align with as we continue our mission of providing leading IT with exemplary customer service.

Fast Start

This year, we qualified for the Fast Start program and a couple members of our team were able to participate in a competitive race at Atlanta Motorsports Park with real race cars and a cone handling and skills course. Our guys had a ton of fun and were really excited to have participated in this awesome, exclusive part of the event!

Day 1

Day One was arrival day for a majority of the attendees. The welcome session was emceed by Phil Keenan, President of MicroCorp, and featured lots of great insights and information about the industry, as well as Phil’s famous British dad joke humor (If you were there, you know exactly what we are talking about). Phil covered a lot of topics, but especially cloud, the digital transformation, and how MicroCorp can help identify and support opportunities for success. After his session, we heard more about what MicroCorp, from their unique position in the market, are seeing followed by some smaller breakout group sessions to discuss topics like cloud, SD-WAN, teaming, and more.

After completing the business portion of the event, we were all treated to an awesome venue, the College Football Hall of Fame in downtown Atlanta. This place was very cool, and for techies like us, filled with awesome technology like smart screens, advanced RFID chips and more to enhance and personalize the experience based on your favorite college teams. If you have not been here and are a college sports lover, you need to check it out. We ended the evening kicking field goals and throwing the pigskin in the indoor skills area surrounded by our peers in the IT and telecom industry. This evening was a lot of fun!

Day 2

Day Two was all business for the first half of the day. We attended some great sessions on the state of the industry, hearing some great information from MicroCorp on trends they are seeing from Karin Fields, CEO of MicroCorp, followed by a high energy and highly useful presentation from Dan Tyre of Hubspot. Dan created the term “Smarketing” many years ago to describe the ever-changing relationship between sales and marketing and how these two internal organizations have gone from virtually at odds to heavy reliance on one another to produce results for their customers – and simply HELP them, something we strive for every single day. It was highly insightful, and Dan was a great speaker and true authority on this topic.

After lunch there were several more sessions on sales, One-on-One meetings with the top providers in the industry, and a session on the upcoming Ultimate Partner Training event in Irving, Texas, as well as the many other tools available from MicroCorp to experience even more business success. But the best event of the day was the exciting and high energy dinner reception to recognize success for partners performing well and finding great, impactful IT and telecom solutions for their customers.

The dinner reception opened with a full drumline who participated throughout to help cheer along teammates, award recipients, and more. There were ample giveaways and tons of awards were given out to recognize the most successful partners for the year. Pioneer Technology was thrilled and honored to be recognized as a Top 10 Sales award winner as well!

A Truly Great Event

Overall, this event was AWESOME! Our team left with a renewed sense of excitement for the industry and what’s coming in the near future, and this reaffirmed our own direction as an MSP and telecom provider in working towards partnerships focused on truly helping our customers, not just being an order-taking vendor. We learned about sales, marketing, operations, and more – and got some “hardware” to show for our hard work as well. If you have heard about MicroCorp’s One on One event, and have not attended before, you will not be disappointed next year should you decide to attend. You will network with the best and learn from real experts in the field. We want to thank MicroCorp for putting on such a valuable and high-quality event.