Bryan Pistone Resigns From Stanton
Stanton continues to hemorrhage top sales talent with word coming down that Bryan Pistone has resigned from his position of Vice President of Sales at the concern. Pistone will reportedly join Numark in 2011.
The news comes immediately after we reported that Dave Hetrick, Director of Worldwide Sales, for the Stanton Group departed the company. With just weeks to go before one of the industry’s biggest retail events of the year, the news doesn’t bode well for the company or Stanton’s future. Fact is, Pistone was a fixture at the NAMM convention and spearheaded much of the fanfare for their new products. Did Pistone leave because there was nothing for him to really sink his teeth into as far as new product premiers?
Stanton’s prior NAMM debuts have been a disappointment with a lot of hype, but extremely poor execution. In fact, the company never truly recovered from their public breakup with Native Instruments over Final Scratch and hasn’t been able to release a substantial pro DJ product in a long time. With such a lackluster track record, it’s been amazing to witness how Stanton’s upper management, including CEO Tim Dorwart, has been able to hang on to their positions for this long.
With Stanton’s troubles and once-venerable brand Cerwin-Vega essentially on life-support, the question is why Rory Brooks from MML Capital, previously Mezzanine Finance, hasn’t become more infuriated at the Stanton Group’s performance with his investment potentially circling the drain, and attempted to institute some positive changes.
Word is that Stanton will have a couple of products to showcase at NAMM, but they will strictly focus on the consumer market with a game-oriented controller / media player and another retread of one of their CD players. The problem is that they will most likely have to import someone from their European sales team to do the Dog ‘n’ Pony show at the midnight hour. Talk about a patsy. This poor soul won’t be able to leverage years of personal relationships to nail down orders and will have to continually field questions on the exodus of Pistone and Hetrick. Not pretty.
The Future: We sincerely hope that Stanton can somehow get it together and regroup, but we’ve been saying this year after year and the signs are certainly not favorable…
