Forrester’s Jay McBain is touted as a channel expert. He is a favorite to keynote in Vegas. This week I did agree with one point he made:
“In an inventive world, we’re not a product sales company anymore. Companies’ growth will come from driving adoption, deeper integrations and stickiness, and driving cross-sell/upsell/enrichment of other parts of their portfolios and other innovations.”
If you want to increase CCaaS (and other Smart tech) sales, there will need to be a BDR position that works with partners to upsell/cross-sell into accounts. It will need to be a proactive collaborative effort. The BDR person will need a decent amount of knowledge about a broad range of technologies available. Various use cases and other granular marketing collateral will be needed to facilitate this upsell.
Your CRM should be flagging accounts by size, vertical and buyer title.
- – Size – small biz, mid-market, enterprise – all buy different.
- – Vertical – sell deeper into certain accounts by bringing a specialist in like you do with Healthcare and Hospitality.
- – Buyer Title – might determine which departments are being sold to.
Telecom has always been a product based sale. And more accurately, a replacement sale. More transaction and substitution than anything.
- * PBX to IP-PBX to Hybrid to Cloud.
- * DSL to T1 to Ethernet.
- * Router to managed router to SD-WAN.
It’s why the channel struggles to sell more. We sell the replacement or the next level up because Discovery and solution selling are hard(er). And channel has been about supplying demand, not creating it. The vendors are not doing anything to increase awareness or education or market offerings at all. Beyond the big boys – AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Cisco, Microsoft – pushing their usual services, who is advertising to the buyers about Cloud Contact Center, Smart tech, IoT, CyberSecurity, AI or any emerging tech? When selling CCaaS, Smart Tech, Cyber-Sec, AI and more… there is nothing to substitute. It is about Solutions and Outcomes.
When you sell by outcome or by educating the client on the tech available to improve their business processes, that’s where the Consultative Sale is. That’s where the Advisor piece really hits the gravel. It is also where the larger ARPU is.
While the channel does not create demand, it should be helping to educate the buyers. The Buyers are not supposed to be up to snuff on what tech is available; that is the advisor’s role. We should be showcasing the best tech and practices to our clients in order for them to stay competitive. There are partners that do that. Some partners are specializing like in cloud services or in CX or in cybersec. This might be the answer to longevity.
Selling dial-tone replacement versus migrating a business to a system that allows for omni-channel engagement with employees and customers is a big difference. Some of it is mindset. If you think the cloud isn’t for everyone and hardware owned is a better deal, well, your slice of the market is small and will not grow, but also there isn’t a lot I can do with that mindset.
It is why vendors will have to jump in to cross-sell and upsell. The ARPU, user adoption, stickiness and customer satisfaction will require the vendor’s interaction. I don’t think partners will do it alone. Will they upsell? Will they offer training to increase user adoption? Will they check on customer satisfaction of the tech? Will they cross-sell products to better the outcome or secure the tech? I don’t know.
Partners need to be better trained in – not product – solutions and sales strategy around the solution.
Partners deals should be deconstructed so that other partners can learn from the wins (and the losses).
Of course, vendors struggle with this themselves, so empowering partners with this will be difficult. But as more vendors lean on the channel, it will be the vendors who fully engage with the partner that wins. Not the best SPIFF, but the most trusted partner.