When Karen Letain walked over to Luc Gervais at an Ottawa IT security trade show three years, she had a simple goal: do some business.<A vice-president and co-founder of a security education company, she wanted Gervais' fledgling VAR company to buy into a marketing event she was putting on.
Instead, they ended up having coffee. Sparks flew.
“What I saw was a passion and a drive and an excitement about him that made me want to see how much farther together we could push his company,” she recalled.
One thing led to another and before long they’d created a Gatineau, Que.-based channel marketing firm.
CMI International acts as a middleman for vendors who can’t or don’t want to open Canadian offices. It creates marketing plans and recruits resellers, whom it also shepherds.
With a staff of seven working for 11 vendors and 14 resellers, the company pulled in $2.4 million last year. Their target for this year $3.1 million.
Talking to the couple, who often finish each other’s sentences, it’s obvious it was a match made, well, in a business school if not in heaven.
Over that coffee, they talked about the problems foreign companies have selling IT products in Canada.
“She said, ‘I’d love to see your business plan’,” recalls Gervais. “I said, ‘What business plan?’ That’s when she rolled her eyes and realized this guy needs help.”
Sales background
Not that he wasn’t knowledgeable about the industry. He’d worked for years in the IT industry, mostly in sales for companies such as SHL Systemhouse and Chrysalis-IS, where he was director of North American sales.
Unhappy with answering to others, he started his own firm representing software companies.
Letain, a mother with two children married to a man she met when they both worked at Corel Corp., was tired of the travel demands from her job.
As they talked she thought his company should be representing software and hardware companies who didn’t understand the needs of working in a country with two official languages spread across a continent.
In no time at all they decided to work together, said Gervais, a 42-year-old bachelor with two dogs.
“She had a drive and a passion as much as I did,” he said, “and that meant a lot if you’re going to partner. Partners are more difficult than a marriage because you have to have full trust.”
It shows in their titles: She’s senior vice-president of operations. He’s vice-president of sales and marketing.
CMI concentrates on security-related products. It tries to get a sense of what companies going to be buying in the next year and then finds vendors with those products.
Resellers are recruited, either from its existing stable (which includes Bell Canada. xWave and ESI Technologies of Montreal) or new ones. CMI has created a three-tier partner program for all its vendors, with the highest level rewarded with greatest product discounts.
It creates sales and marketing plans, which includes building leads for resellers and help in creating product demand through pilot projects or proofs of concepts.
Companies represented include Patch Link, a patch management solution; Tenix America, which makes a network security suite of applications; and SecureWave, a desktop security application.
Canadian content
Not all vendors are foreign, though. It recently took on two Canadian companies for representation here who want to focus their attention on the U.S. market.
In its model CMI depends largely on a percentage of revenues from its partners’ sales, including maintenance or subscription revenue.
While they obviously enjoy their work, it does have challenges, including running interference between customers and vendors on complex questions.
“It’s a juggling act to ensure the end user has the support they require in a reasonable time,” said Letain.
But after three years the pair have no complaints. “The day we stop having fun is the day to sell,” she said.
