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
