The post COVID world will see intense competition, and Channel partners will need to develop a robust strategy to drive sales growth, according to iland’s Vice-President Sales, EMEA, Johnny Carpenter.
Carpenter said that as businesses adjust post-pandemic there is a strong sense of urgency as customers work to improve resilience, re-engineer their business and procure the technology to support this.
He said that to capture this growing demand and translate it into sales, channel partners face strong competition.
“The days of waiting for the customer to come to you with a problem and selling them an off-the-shelf solution are long gone. Now, by the time a business has decided it has a problem and defined its solution requirements, it is already planning to go out to multiple channel partners to get competitive quotes. ”
Carpenter said this immediately puts partners in a reactive position. It requires a lot of work and – because the customer has already decided what they want – there’s limited opportunity to add value and really show the customer what you are capable of. Plus, in the case where the customer has gone out to three different partners, there is only a 30 percent chance of winning the deal.
“In this scenario, a race to the bottom on price is the result. Customers view the partner as transactional and make their buying decision based on price, not value”, he said.
For the industry as a whole this is bad news; ultimately, nobody wins and it is unsustainable. The change channel partners must make is to evolve from ‘order taker’ to ‘trusted advisor’. This means creating a proactive strategy to control the conversation with the customer, gain mindshare and thereby insulate the relationship against the competition.
Carpenter thinks that the answer is to get ahead of the customer’s priorities and tell them about the problems they need to solve before they identify them. If you are the first to inform a customer about an issue they need to address, you put yourself in the prime position to be the trusted advisor that helps them to solve it.
“If I have a flat tyre, I’ll fix it straight away because it risks my safety and ability to go about my business. But if I decide I might need some new tyres, I’ll shop around at different suppliers, taking up a lot of their time in the process. The channel partner needs to be the one informing the customer that they have the technology equivalent of a flat tyre and advising them of the best way to fix it”, he said.
The good news is that customers are receptive to advice at the moment.
“The experience of the past year means many businesses are embarking on projects that weren’t in their roadmap until recently. Whether that is providing remote office technology for home-working employees, implementing new security systems, or migrating more workloads to the cloud, there is a lot going on simultaneously. In unfamiliar territory, businesses want suppliers to advise them on what has worked for others and provide assurance that they are doing the right thing”, Carpenter said.
Carpenter lists five tactics partners should adopt to shift from order-taker to trusted partner.
1) Be proactive: build campaigns that address current challenges and take them directly to potential clients.
2) Stay current: monitor the market for rising trends and share them with customers to continue the conversation.
3) Offer advice outside the sales pitch: share insight and experiences to show potential customers you have the expertise and track record to be trusted.
4) Engage with vendors: work with them to identify common customer pain points and build solution examples to offer clients before they even know they have a problem.
5) Keep questioning: in every customer engagement ask questions that open up new avenues for discussion. What are the issues they haven’t even thought of yet?
