I'm an old Belden guy. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, this is my 50th year as a Belden customer. And every one of those years I had a Belden catalog. In fact, one of the first things I did when I joined Belden as an employee in 1991 was start to collect old Belden catalogs. I now go back to 1964 in original, complete catalogs. I have bits and pieces of older catalogs, back to 1939....with rubber video cable!! In fact, if you have a Belden catalog before 1964, I would LOVE to have it. Tell me what you have and what you want for it.

My collection has an endpoint. The last paper catalog was 2006. That was eight years ago. I still carry one with me in my laptop bag. It's a little hard to flip through the pages on our web page (although the web page is continuously improving) and the vast majority of that old catalog is still viable. But there's one thing I keep wondering about: was that old paper catalog the place you learned about new products?

Now maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you learned (and continue to learn) about new products by word-of-mouth. I do believe that is the most powerful sales tool that any company, can have. There is no question in my mind that there are one or two people in every organization, including huge networks or group broadcasters, that decide what cable to use. This is why I spend so much time talking at tradeshows and to engineers (SBE, SMPTE, AES and more.) Over 50 presentations this year. One year I gave 74! And I'm not the only Belden employee giving presentations. This is why it is so hard to measure what I do. I could talk to a thousand people in a big hall when one person writes something in his iPad or phone, and three years later, we get a huge order. How can we measure that? That one note justified that entire trip but I'll probably never know it.

I remember back when I was a broadcast installer (back in the Dark Ages), I learned about new cables from my boss, or from my mentor. I don't ever remember getting a new product bulletin on a new cable product. And, while I had that Belden catalog, even back then it was a little intimidating. There must have been 50 single pair analog audio foil-shielded install cables. Which one to use? I ended up with 9451. But that's because my boss (Kevin Mostyn, Director of Engineering at KYA/KLHT) TOLD me to use it.

Customers fall into two categories. First is the grizzled engineer that has been using the same cable since 1902, the year we started. He's darned if he's going to change now. That's why there are products in the catalog that go all the way back. They worked, and you learned how to use them, so why change? I guess it's only when they stop working that you are forced to pull out the old Belden catalog and look for an option. Of course, today that catalog is not our whole line. What about the 30% of our total product line that are new products, not in that catalog? How do you find out about those? Talk to someone? Get out your crystal ball?

Then there is the second customer, who throws a dart at the paper catalog and uses whatever it lands on. The cable might work but it might be hard to find, or expensive, or our distributor has nothing in stock. But right next to it the distributor's warehouse, he has a million feet of something even better. How would you know? I suppose you could take a walk through his warehouse and note all the cables in huge inventory. But that giant pile of cable might be something exotic and expensive for a single customer and does not indicate "popularity". You can always go by price, but then you end up with the cheapest, low quality plastics and corresponding performance. The only effective way is to learn to read our web page, and know how to get to the Tech Data, that deep multipage document with all the gory details on each cable we make. Do you know how to do that? (Email me if you don't.)

For example, there's a picture here of one of our new audio cables. This is 1353A, a 24 AWG Multi-Conductor- AES/EBU Digital Audio Cable. Did you know about this? I think a lot of products just don't "take off" because nobody knows about them. I can't tell you the number of times that a customer yelled at me (friendly yelling) when I show them the very cable they needed six months ago for that big project. I share their pain.

So the question to you, dear reader, is how do we get this information to you? Should we have a "What's New" email list and send you stuff? (Would you ever read it if we did?) I know that no single method is 100% effective. I'll bet if I hired an airplane to write our new part number in the sky over your house, you would be on vacation that day. So what is the most effective way? Or what combination of approaches? Most of you would check off "all of the above" in which case I'm back where I started. If I could "think" a new part number and description into every head out there, that would be cool. Until then, if you think about this and send me your ideas, I will share them here. Just write them in the box below or, if you want to discuss them first, I'm at steve.lampen@belden.com

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