Tom Walker

TAS-mania

In "Foots in the door", Business Strategy, Operational Excellence on December 11, 2009 at 4:10 pm

What do you do when you come across a large complex opportunity that requires weeks of time consuming, deep pre-sales professional services in order to win the deal? If you’re like many partners, you’ll go after the deal but not quite spend the amount of time necessary to really tailor the perfect solution that can clearly pay for itself. You look at the opportunity and say, “how much of my resources can I really afford to pore into this opportunity without any guarantee that I’ll win the deal?” A balancing act right? What if you could increase your odds of winning the deal without having to chew up all of your resources for several weeks?

Enter Avaya TAS (Technical Account Services). This is a program available to Avaya partners for the most application rich opportunities you find. So I know what your next question is.. how much does it cost? The good news it doesn’t cost anything if you don’t win the deal? This means there’s zero financial risk for you. If you win the deal, you pay Avaya for the professional services already completed. Of course, you could position it the same way with your client so his/her expectations are aligned with yours. Or, maybe you do charge the client 25% of the eventual feeup front so they’re invested and you  guarantee yourself some revenue. Here’s the benefits I see from this.

  • Maximize your account control — if the client commits to this level of engagement, you’re in the driver’s seat.
  • Much more application rich sales. I like to think application rich is a euphemism for “margin rich”.
  • You can triage your finite engineering/PS  resources where they capture revenue most quickly.
  • Dramatically increase your conversion rate — I seem to recall the closure rate is somewhere in the high 80’s%.

This could represent a major shift in how you approach these larger complex opportunities. Instead of selling the customer a very complex solution that solves all of their needs, you are selling them on a no risk opportunity to develop a tailored solution that pays for itself and helps them grow their business.

Sounds like a win-win to me.

Tom

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The problem with “complimentary” vendors

In "Foots in the door" on November 19, 2009 at 7:08 pm

If you look at Catalyst’s line card, you’ll see a number of what we call “complimentary” solutions that obviously compliment our “core” strategic vendors like Avaya. Unfortunately for you and everyone, we’ve perpetuated a mindset that goes something like this “You need to sell these complimentary technologies as part of your overall solution so you can increase the size of deals, cross sell, make higher margin, yada yada.”

So given that, let me jump in the brain of a sales rep for a minute. “I’ve got a 2M annual quota and only so many hours in the day. Am I going to focus my energy on big deals that help me make my quota, or asking the customer ‘do you want fries with that?’” Mind you, I’m not agreeing with this logic, but I think it’s a direct result of how we’ve positioned these vendors.  I think we’ve been missing the real point.

The #1 value of these complimentary vendors isn’t that they help you sell a larger, more robust, margin rich solution. Not by a long shot. Take time to understand these solutions, and you’ll find out they solve very real and specific problems that are agnostic to their voice or network platform. You may not be able to sell a customer a new or upgraded IPT/UC solution, or even a new WAN/LAN because that has as much to do with timing/funding as it does your brilliant salesmanship. But ask the right questions, and you can crack into that account with some of our complimentary vendors (I really don’t want to use that word anymore). Also, these could be very healthy sales. I spent some time with D.J. Fairley,  a Metropolis rep, yesterday who told me about several deals that had more profit than your average system sale. He told me about a national multi-site finance company that bought his solution for no other reason than they were incurring fines for mis-dialed 911 charges. It was an easy question to ask and led to a huge deal with quick ROI for the client.

The other benefit here is that many of you are trying to figure out how to build an inside sales practice. The traditional M/O is to have your inside reps call customers and prospects to qualify and set appointments to explore a new UC/IPT solution. Why not focus them in on a  very specific problem/solution and hit the targets that you know have that problem today, and make it something that they can qualify, book,  sell within 30 days?

You get quick revenue, great experience for your inside reps (+confidence and job satisfaction), and a new relationship (and inside track) with a client that thinks you’re the cat’s meow for solving a problem very quickly.

If you want to talk more about this, call me!

Tom

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Section 179 Snert

In "Foots in the door", Business Strategy on November 19, 2009 at 5:06 pm

BTW, “snert” is a thick pea soup from the Netherlands consumed mostly in the winter (yeah, yeah, I know.. the soup thing is getting out of hand)  Likewise, Section 179 stimulates consumption of technology projects by your customers and prospects this winter — specifically before the end of the year.

Thanks to Stephanie Meek, Channel Account Manager for Extreme Networks for giving me a primer on this. If you know about it already — congrats. If not, you need to get your arms around this. Section 179 is an IRS tax code that allows businesses to deduct the full purchase price of qualifying equipment purchased or financed before the end of the tax year.  I’m simplifying, but businesses can take up to a 250k deduction and a bonus depreciation of 50% on the amount that exceeds the 250k (Barack added that little part).

Check out http://www.section179.org/index.html and http://www.crestcapital.com/tax_deduction_calculator.

Good Selling,

Tom

 

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