Avant Enhances Channel Sales Enablement Program

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CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO — Avant  (a Premier Sponsor) has enhanced its Channel Sales Enablement Program, delivered to partners as a service, and released its BattleApp v.2.1 with expanded face-to-face selling capabilities.

The announcement comes at this week’s Channel Partners Conference & Expo. The program includes sales methodology, skilled sales engineering support resources and enhanced training experiences. In addition, it includes the upgraded BattleApp that partners can use to accelerate sales of SD-WAN, UCaaS, IaaS, security and other offerings.

Drew Lydecker, Avant’s president and co-founder, tells Channel Partners the market is changing at a rapid rate right now and “our DNA is sales and helping our customers differentiate themselves in the market.”

“We’re going to do that by various methods … giving them the right people, the right tools to go into what we like to think is battle,” he said. “We think right now business is war and perception is reality. There’s a change in every aspect of IT and there’s never been a better opportunity for our customers to go out and seize it. That’s why we often say this is the golden era of the trusted adviser and we want to be that true arms dealer for them, and we want to give them everything they need to be successful in the market from technology, people and process.”

The company has seen a “43-day reduction in time to revenue when partners leverage our Channel Sales Enablement program,” Lydecker said.

The latest release of the BattleApp includes features such as: enhanced white-label and fully partner-brandable user interface; expanded fiber-tool and data-center functionality with smart filtering and Google Maps API overlay; and “solution filters” for rapid down-selection of providers to those with relevant product offerings.{ad}

“Our entire platform around the BattleApp, this is absolutely crucial to differentiating our customers in the marketplace, being able to have them have resources that they would never have otherwise,” Lydecker said. “And so the ability to down-select providers, the ability to get up to speed in the market quicker than anybody else, the ability to show their customers the differences of all the providers that exist in the marketplace today, these all help shorten the life cycle.”

Avant also is rolling out more Special Forces Training sessions, three-day training events for elite partners that include an introduction into the Avant methodology, competence training for enablement tools, and advanced strategies to pitch and close next-generation IT offerings.

Other program enhancements include: