Not to be stopped by COVID-19, Pacific Office Automation (POA) held their Annual Business Meeting on January 15. This is their annual company sales kick off, typically held in Portland Oregon, home of their HQ.
Last year, senior industry executives at the highest levels converged on the north western city to attend a truly amazing event. Unfortunately, Doug Pitassi wouldn’t be parachuting into the room to kick off the meeting this time. Or would he?
In the last year, I have been on more Zoom calls, more Teams meetings, more webinars than I have in my entire career combined, as have all of you.
I’ve attended major product launches, sat through dozens and dozens (and dozens) of significant announcements, but none was anything like what POA put together via Zoom.
First, let’s talk about the fact that at one point they had over 650 people logged in on a Friday evening. And not just POA employees who had to be there; there were the most senior of senior people from virtually all of their OEMs and vendor partners. Did I mention event was 3 hours long?
Next, can we discuss the production value of this show? It was flawless and so well-coordinated, which is a nearly impossible task for a live show. Yet, they pulled it off.
While last year’s event had their top sales people doing ballet in a version of dancing with the stars, this year POA had their people submit Tik Tok videos. Give sales people some creative leeway and an iPhone and you’re going to see some hilarious videos, which we did. So many. I wish I had a recording of this to share with you.
POA also took the time to go branch by branch to review company sales results. Complete accountability was on the screen for all to see and with COVID, there were some areas that need to be addressed in 2021, as would be expected. However, despite the issues in 2020, POA actually grew (if I understood that correctly).
My hat’s off to POA for not only keeping their tradition of a big company kickoff, but for showing the industry that with some effort, Zoom calls can be an incredible experience.
I look forward to covering the 2022 kick off in Portland. But for now, this was as good as a substitution as you could ever ask for. Well done POA!
SOURCE Industry Analysts Inc.
