As companies add UC+CC or UC to CCaaS or other bundles, the success of sales will be limited and take a lot of time to come. Why?
Because most salespeople do not have the training, acumen and coaching to sell beyond transactions.
POTS Replacement, cell phones, broadband, fiber, SD-WAN are all selling because they are transactional. UC+CC, Cyber-Sec, CX, Private 5G, IoT, AI and so many other technologies are a complex sale. They have many decision makers, longer sales cycles, and complicated service delivery. That doesn’t match up with the sales skills of most people.
It also doesn’t match up with most sales management. They don’t know how to coach. They don’t train-up. They watch KPIs and yell.
To get ARPU up, sales training is going to have to get better. Co-selling may become the norm.
Companies barely want to invest in their own employees; I don’t see them spending annually to train up partners in sales skills and product.
The problem with the current crop of technologies like Cyber-Sec, AI and UC+CC is that they do not replace anything. They are additive. Selling a replacement is a transaction. Selling something additive is a different sale.
The channel is based in small business. Most Partner programs didn’t even allow partners to sell to mid-market, government, education or enterprise. Now pundits and channel execs alike are saying how the channel will get them more enterprise deals