Expanding AV Solutions

AVNation’s Tim Albright recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Tony Fragale, a representative from Starin Marketing, at the CTI National Sales Meeting. Starin Marketing partners with CTI to distribute their AV solutions, including their newly expanded Origin Acoustics professional loudspeaker line.

Tony explained that Starin wanted to expand their CTI portfolio “to make sure that [they] had a solution for every single part of the conference room.” While they’ve offered speakers before, they wanted to add “something forward-thinking” so that they could have more involvement in manufacturing.

One example Tony shared was Origin Acoustics creating a magnetic mounting option for their ceiling speakers, which came directly from a customer request. He explained that because Origin Acoustics was still early in the manufacturing process for this product line when they received the request, they were able to easily adapt.

Importance of Higher ED

Albright asked Tony why reaching out and offering AV solutions to higher education and corporate IT channels was so important for a distributor like Starin. As he put it, “When Starin goes and reaches out to these end users and then, you know, works with companies like CTI, it lends itself to more open conversation.”

Customers feel “generally less threatened when they’re not being sold to,” Tony explained. “We’re just trying to, you know, get an understanding of what they’re currently using and then sort of forward the opportunity off to them.”

AV Solutions for Every Need

This channel strategy and focus on understanding customer needs seems key to Starin’s recent growth. By partnering closely with companies like CTI and Origin Acoustics, they can deliver AV solutions tailored specifically to their customer base.

And their approach is working – they’ve expanded into an array of conference room audio-visual solutions, like the Origin Acoustics Pro line. As Tony said, they wanted options “for every single part of the conference room.”

If you want to learn more about Starin Marketing, you can visit their website at sterin.biz or email Tony directly Starin.biz.