Yearly Archives: 2009
TAS-mania
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
The problem with “complimentary” vendors
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
Section 179 Snert
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
Biz Dev Idea..
Why not partner with a recruiter who specializes in senior IT placement — for instance CIO’s? Work out a partnership with them where they get to provide their clients (the companies looking for a new CIO for example) a high level (and most importantly objective) assessment and map of their communications network (security, wireless, switching, routing, IPT, etc.) provided by your company. This way, when the new CIO arrives for his first day on the job, he has a concise, unbiased report sitting on his or her desk compliments of your company. This could be a great way for the recruiter to differentiate themselves (in a cutt-throat market), and for you to get quick PS business and build a lead gen engine where you have the inside track. Again, am I naive, or is there something to this? I’d like to hear from you if you have an opinion..
Thanks!
Tom
Sip, Soup, Sipera..is there a connection?
I think there iiiiiss! First person to tell me the John Hughs film reference gets a nice Catalyst logo’d goody. Just had a deep dive on Sipera and when my head had a chance to stop spinning, I was able to mentally net it out for you. Here’s the top things I absorbed:
First, they have a sophisticated threat lab called VIPER. This group works around the clock to determine day zero security threats in the UC/Voip arena. Since nobody else is doing this, you can sell their vulnerability assessment to large clients and show them pretty quickly a number of vulnerabilities they have but aren’t even aware of. Apparently, they’ve had some big wins in this area alone. In my opinion, this is a great foot in the door with large enterprise, government clients and call centers and gives you a unique angle.
Second, you can offer a managed security service around UC/VoIP to mitigate threats in real time. SIPera goes to the application layer and mitages a whole bunch of threats that aren’t being addressed today. Managed Services in Security is a big play and this gives you a chance to get into a margin rich annuity business. BTW, the traditional security guys aren’t offering this, IPT guys aren’t either. Nice to fish where the other fishermen aren’t right?
Third, a lot of customers buy an SBC and think it provides adequate security – Sipera mitigates a whole bunch of threats since it works at the application layer unlike an SBC which is only at Layer 3. Sipera has a bunch of examples where the customer incurred a wrath of security issues because they thought their SBC had them covered.
That’s probably the tip of the ice burg, but my major take aways. Call me if you want to explore this since Sipera since it gives you a trojan horse into new accounts and a means to build nice annuity revenue.
Good Selling,
Tom
To Quote Flavor Flav…
“Don’t believe the hype!” Cisco, in their latest effort to keep pace with Avaya, just announced on Monday their own version of session manager, titled “ORO” — the spanish word for gold and also suspiciously close to “AURA”. Okay, so I just made that part up — but they really do have their own session manager now. Given the strength of their marketing machine — we can expect them to peddle this story with vigor.
To help you head this off at the pass, Jim Sevier has put together a podcast so you can keep your customers informed of the dramatic differences between Avaya and Cisco as it relates to Session Manager. Click Here http://cnvrg.com/cag/?p=238
Good Selling,
Tom
Skunk Works
“Skunk Works” was (still is?) the official name for Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs. Since then, the term has been frequently used to describe “off the grid” hit or miss, bold experiments.
Convergence Soup has started it’s own Skunk Works program designed to go outside the box for Catalyst partners to find new opportunities. SSW may not be as audacious as the program that produced the U2 aircraft (considering it took me 3 minutes to get it off the ground); however, sometimes the best ideas are the simplest, right?
Today’s results from Soup Skunk Works, while primitive, produces one potential Juniper or Extreme opportunity and 2 or 3 Nortel/Aura migration opportunities. Results will change daily because it’s a snapshot in time. Eventually I’ll figure out how to put these into some sort of RSS feed or something.
Good Selling,
Tom
If Sun Tzu were a VAR…
This week, I spent some time with Matt Rupert, the Aruba CAM for the Southwest. I’ll make this post a two-parter since I got a couple of great gems out of my time with Matt. First is this: Aruba is evangelizing the concept of “rightsizing” the network.
The idea is that hundeds of thousands of organizations that have adopted wireless networking are duplicating ports needlessly and spending more money on their network than they need to. While Cisco needs to keep refreshing their wired switched ports to continue to meet the expectations of Wall Street, you the Read the rest of this entry
Timing is everything..
Think about this: If you are trying to find new customers, what are the chances you find a prospect that is looking to move some projects forward? The timing is the toughest part right? Sure, you can always find some way to wiggle your way in and start the relationship and that’s great, but sales cycles are long enough as it is. What if you get a decision maker right when he’s new on the job? Okay..maybe he or she is too overwhelmed and is still figuring out the lay of the land.. but what if you can help him figure out the lay of the land as an unbiased third party. You put together an audit or assessment of his network, telecom Read the rest of this entry
