This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Security Business magazine. Don’t forget to mention Security Business magazine on LinkedIn and @SecBusinessMag on Twitter if you share it.
Since bringing on CEO Ann Fandozzi – a newcomer to the security industry – in February, Convergint has continued its shakeup at the top, bringing in a group of security industry outsiders to helm the company (hat tip to IPVM, which went in depth in early October on these changes).
One is Convergint’s new Chief Marketing Officer, Julie Roehm, who I met with at GSX. Roehm has a long career and history of marketing and consulting, including for Ford (where she met Fandozzi), software maker SAP, Ride and ABRA Auto Body & Glass, where she worked with Fandozzi.
As I made an offhand comment about the diminishing booth sizes at GSX upon meeting her, Roehm jumped on the opportunity to ask me about out-of-the-box ways that I have seen companies make their presence felt at the show. It highlighted how Roehm and Convergint intend to take a new – for lack of a better word, outsider’s – approach to the integration industry. She indicated that the days of needing a map to navigate the Stanley booth may be behind us.
“It is the old way of thinking,” she said. “When I was with Ford, we created the ‘Jeep Experience’ (for tradeshows, held outside the exhibit hall). Before that, it was all about the size of the booth. We need to be more progressive.”
Roehm fully intends to bring that progressive marketing strategy to the security industry. With an engineering degree and an MBA, she carries a unique marketer’s perspective. “I’m the most quantitatively trained marketer you will come across,” she said. “I’m interested in data and its analysis, and how it can return a profit.”
Roehm said learning marketing in the automotive industry was a great first step, but her time at SAP formed the true strategy she wants to employ at Convergint – that of brand storytelling. “You need to tell the customer’s story so that when someone sees that [SAP] logo on something, they know it is quality and are willing to pay more.”
Roehm will focus at Convergint on “customer references, stories, and digital tools help our salespeople talk to customers in a different way, and help open [talks with] anyone in the business chain about what we can do with our services.”
She continued: “The opportunity here is to open up the minds of our customers. I’d rather think of us being less ‘about security,’ because that narrows us down to people who only have security in their title,” Roehm said. “Protecting, securing, and making safer – those are [concepts] a lot of people are interested in, which opens the door for us to bring solutions from all these partners that we have sitting around us [at GSX] to bear in a more interesting way.”
For her, more interesting means more ways to leverage the data that security systems produce – a mantra of many manufacturers.
“Let’s talk [to customers] about the richness of the data – how we can synthesize that data, and glean insights from it. If you layer that in with all the physical pieces that we put into play, it accelerates the value to the customer.”
As we wrote in these pages in September, “data is security gold.” Moving forward, it will be interesting to see how a global mega-integrator like Convergint can transform that message into marketing and business success.
