Intelisys AMP'd Images: Partners Explore B2B Purchasing Trends, CX, Security Solutions
Customers "literally don't know" how their own buying journey works, and that's an opportunity for partners.
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The audience at Intelisys AMP'd Newport Beach 2023
Expanding on his idea of buyer enablement at the Intelisys AMP’d Newport Beach event, B2B sales researcher Brent Adamson pointed to the travel agent industry.
The travel broker industry frequently arises in channel discussions. Namely, the rise of booking sites like Expedia have functioned as arguments why marketplaces are an inevitable destination for most technology procurement.
Adamson noted that the rise of the internet, along with various travel comparison sites that allowed customers to design vacations on their own, essentially destroyed the travel agent industry.
“Travel agents were almost literally wiped off the face of the earth as a profession in the late ’90s,” Adamson said.
But that wasn’t the end of things. Adamson said that 10-15 years later, travel agents made a comeback. He credited that comeback to the overwhelming proliferation of booking websites, and the information on those websites.
Once again, too much good information can be a bad thing.
“Have you tried to book a trip lately? It’s really really hard. There are 15 different sites for hotel and flight comparisons. You know what would be really great? If I could just pick up the phone and ask them, ‘What do you think I should do?’ Be your customer’s travel agent,” Adamson said.
Mike Wolfington, regional vice president of sales for Intelisys’ West region, delivered a keynote.
That keynote in part urged partners to demonstrate their cross-technological expertise to customers. The worst thing a customer can tell a partner, Wolfington said, is, “I didn’t know you could do that.”
“We’re in the middle of a digital transformation journey within our organization because I thought you were just the telco guy – that we just came to you for network. I thought that’s what you were great at,” Wolfington quoted a hypothetical customer as saying.
Cross-selling is playing a huge role in technology advisors’ growth. Wolfington noted that for the average agent, one customer represents one-third of revenue. The top three largest customers represent more than 60% of revenue. That’s due in part to partners digging deep into those accounts.
“In almost all cases, when you look at the breakdown of those customers, they’re selling four, five or six diverse solutions in order to be successful,” Wolfington said.
Wolfington noted that sales partners are growing faster than ever.
Evidence for that comes from examining Intelisys’ base of platinum partners, who have driven billed monthly revenue of least $1 million.
“Our first 10 platinums took on average 13-14 years to get to that incredible milestone. The last 10 are going platinum in an average of three to four years,” he told attendees.
Intelisys recognized its 42 platinum partners at the event. The TSD made the surprise announcement that Denver-based TekEfficient had earned the recognition.
Wolfington urged partners to consider how adding a new person to their team could change the game.
That person, whether full-time or contractor, can help the business owners focus on what they do best. It could be, as partners discussed at the Wednesday pre-AMP’d conference, a marketing resource.
“You are one hire away from completely transforming your organization and changing your life,” Wolfington told the audience.
Many agents go a long time before making that first hire. Bret Hickenlooper, for example, ran his agency SUMO Communications for 11 years without any full-time employees.
And that decision, he said, stemmed from the entrepeneurial grind that is building an agency.
“Most people left a job where they were making good money. They were probably good salespeople where they were working, and they were making a great living,” Hickenlooper said. “It takes them four to six years to replace that. And once you’ve replaced it with a residual income, you become reluctant to share it with anyone.”
But Hickenlooper said he found himself tired at the end of 11 years.
“I was worn out and stretched very, very thin. I thought, ‘I need to hire some people, or this is just going to wear me out completely.’ So I hired some people,” he said.
And quickly he found that those employees could do even more than he thought they could.
“I realized that I could introduce these people to my customers. And sometimes, whether I want to admit it or not, they like them more than me. They’re ordering more from them than they would have ordered from me, because I hired the right people. And all of a sudden the business really started to grow,” he said.
Wolfington pointed out a factor that he said has given an advantage in the tech services distributor market: its lack of interest in rolling up partners into its own brand.
“We exist to serve you and your ideal future. We do not have a direct sales force. We are not acquiring or partners. We have no appetite for it, because it compromises the integrity of who we are as an organization. We are here for you,” he said.
Jamaal Savwoir, vice president of partner marketing and experience, encouraged partners to take a look at the technologies they want to sell in the long term. For example, customer experience and cybersecurity solutions featured heavily in the keynote and breakout content at AMP’d.
“It’s not just about the business you want to win today, but it’s also about the business you want to grow over time,” Savwoir told the audience. “You’re not going out of business tomorrow; you’re in for the long haul. You’re looking for customers that want to grow with you.”
James Morrison, Intelisys’ national security specialist and a former member of the FBI, presented to partners Thursday morning.
He explained that many victims of data breaches had already installed various cybersecurity tools and services. But those had been treated as more as part of checklist that the C-suite had handed down to IT teams. And IT teams, pressured to get the security project done, take to doing their own hasty research.
“They go on on Google and search for MDR. The first result that pops up is an advertisement for the whoever pays the most to get the top of the ad space,” Morrison said. “And then they buy it because they just think, ‘I don’t have time. I just have to get going and keep doing my thing.’ Then a year later they go, ‘Well, that really sucked. I liked the idea of managed detection and response, but I really don’t like the way they did it. Their customer service is bad.”
Agents have, yet again, the opportunity to coach customers through the information overabundance.
Multiple vendors went on stage to talk technology trends and to showcase customer wins.
Here Paul Van Lierop (right), channel sales engineer at Cato Networks, talks about secure access service edge (SASE) with Patrick Chen (left), Intelisys director of regional engineering.
Cisco on January 24 officially made its Webex CCaaS offering avaliable through the advisor channel. Agents of Intelisys and Telarus previously could only sell the UCaaS component of Webex.
Geoff Works (pictured left), Cisco’s head of agency for Webex, said Cisco recognized that advisors were often tapping into customer accounts that previously operated on-prem Cisco contact centers. But now they no longer need to associate Cisco contact centers with something they need to replace, Works said. Instead, they can help the on-prem Cisco customer move the solution into the cloud. He said much of his task at events like AMP’d is to open up partners’ minds to this way of thinking.
“It’s a challenge to overcome – getting them to move out of that initial reaction to rip-and-replace – but now they have the option to migrate, which is much less intrusive and daunting for a customer.”
Elaine Goodman (pictured right), who heads up Cisco’s overall agency route to market, said the vendor is leaning in with providing its customers and partners full flexibility in deploying technology in the way they prefer.
And that means continued investment in the agent model.
“In the next six months, what you will see is heavy engagement from us with our broker partners, to be involved at events like this in the various locales and really dig in deep to establish the relationships and support those advisors,” Goodman told Channel Futures.
Cisco announced the impending launch late last year, noting that its base of partners eligible to sell CCaaS has expanded drastically. Cisco also opened up Webex CCaaS to any of its collaboration-certified partners. Previously, only about 10% of Cisco’s 3,000-some collaboration partners were certified to sell contact center.
And many of those collaboration partners, who traditionally sold in the reseller model, will be leveraging the agent model, in which the vendor bills and supports the user and provides a recurring commission to the partner.
Homa Shaner last year launched FWRD Tech, a boutique technology consulting firm based in Orange County.
Shaner, who has worked in channel and sales roles in the networking, security and cloud management vendor space over the last decade, is putting that expertise to work to help businesses make the most of IT spend and tap into advanced technologies.
“FWRD tech is non-biased and can provide organizations with a technology roadmap that aligns with their business outcomes,” Shaner told Channel Futures. “The technology landscape is rapidly changing. Being able to make recommendations around the right technology providers based on our knowledge simplifies the IT buyer’s decision-making process and brings best-of-breed options to the organization.”
Joe Jonovic is partner and chief revenue officer at SOLUS Technology Solutions, a Reno, Nevada-based technology advisory firm.
The organization is rolling out a new paid service called SOLUS Care, which offers professional services to clients throughout the life cycle of the technology SOLUS sources for them.
The firm had already been performing many of those services on a free basis.
“We would project-manage the installation. We’d negotiate. We’d populate the contracts. We do billing reviews to ensure proper invoicing for the contracts. We would handle their billing disputes, and we would open up their trouble tickets,” Jonovic told Channel Futures.
Increased professional services are a growing trend in the technology advisor channel. In the advisor/agent model, suppliers provide billing and support to the customer. However, more and more agents are looking to take a larger role in overseeing the life cycle of those accounts. In particular, functioning as the chief escalator for any problems the customers face with their vendors has proven valuable.
“We really do try to provide a white-glove service, and I think it really makes the customer sticky,” Jonovic said.
SOLUS is also offering the service to other partners who only possess the resources to focus on sales.
Partners attended different technology- and business-focused education sessions. The breakout leaders included Michael Sterl, Intelisys’ senior vice president of partner success, pictured above.
Donald Halloran, a member of the executive Ph.D. program at the Daniels College of Business, took partners on a crash course on what motivates IT decision makers.
Attendees wrapped up AMP’d with Happy Hour in the supplier expo.
Attendees wrapped up AMP’d with Happy Hour in the supplier expo.
INTELISYS AMP’D SUMMIT — B2B customers know more about the technology they’re purchasing than you’d expect, and less about their own internal purchasing process than you might think.
Those conclusions come from B2B sales researcher Brent Adamson. He shared where customers have gaps – and overabundance – in the information they have at their disposal for purchasing. Adamson, speaking to an audience of technology advisors at the regional Intelisys AMP’d partner event in Newport Beach, California, urged sellers to position themselves as “sensemakers” to customers who know too much about technology and not enough about their own businesses.
Ecosystem’s Brent Adamson
Information Overload
Adamson, who works for Ecosystems as global head of research and communities, asserted that customers complain about having too much information regarding what they’re going to buy. He cited a Gartner survey of 1,174 B2B buyers, 89% of whom said the information they consumed during the purchasing process was trustworthy.
That lines up well with trends of self-taught “educated buyers” that the channel has been reckoning with for years now. Simply put, customers can know more about technology than they ever could before. On one hand, a new generation of digital natives are tapping into online research as a way to prepare themselves for purchasing. On the other hand, the outpouring of whitepapers and assorted elements of content marketing have made information incredibly easy for prospective customers to access knowledge. In what Adamson dubs “the smartness arms race,” vendors have pummeled customers with information and data – much of it quite accurate – about market trends.
But according to Adamson, there is such a thing as too much knowledge. In the same Gartner survey, 75% of respondents said they encounter an “overwhelming” amount of trustworthy information. Moreover, 62% said they had found trustworthy yet contradictory information from different sources. In Adamson’s own example of overwhelming information, he found 1,300 options for a USB dongle on Amazon. Then he proceeded to get lost in countless reviews.
“This is where information itself is becoming commoditized. We’re all saying really smart stuff. The smartest arms race has ended in a tie. And you know what your customer needs at this point? You know what I need when I’m buying a $15 dongle at two in the morning and I’m just tired and want to go bed? I just want someone to bleeping tell me which dongle should I buy,” Adamson told the audience.
To that end, Adamson suggested that the route to winning is not to produce a better whitepaper than your competitor. One may even find it valuable to talk about competitor’s whitepaper with a customer. The winners, Adamson, will position themselves as trustworthy interpreters of the already available information.
Know Thyself
Adamson touched on the topic of enabling buyers to navigate the “spaghetti bowl” that is their own internal purchasing system. Adamson argued that most customers don’t fully understand their company’s established process for completing a purchae.
“We walk into the customer with a blank sheet of paper and ask them to help draw their buying journey. They don’t know. They literally don’t know,” he said.
For example, he shared a story of a customer agreeing to a $15 million deal that ultimately fell apart. The reason: The customer didn’t know they would need to go through their own capital review board. Henceforth, the salesperson has asked customers if they know how to present to a capital review board.
That buyer enablement, Adamson said, will go a long way.
“They’ve never bought this stuff before, or they haven’t bought it in a long time. You guys sell this every single day,” he said. “You have it in your power to make your customers feel more confident in their ability to navigate their organization by just teaching them what that looks like.”
Adamson shared the most powerful sentence starter he has heard a salesperson say to a client: “In working with other customers like you …” It’s a message that resonates with the agent community, whose value proposition grows with each experience helping customers purchase cloud and carrier services.
“This is your opportunity to take your customer by the hand (figuratively) and lead them through their buying journey. Be their buying coach, their buying Sherpa — whatever you want to call it. You can actually make their lives easier because you know more about how to buy inside their own organization than they do themselves,” he said.
Read more of Adamson’s insights, as well as comments from Intelisys partners, suppliers and employees in the 14 images above. Also take a look at Channel Futures’ coverage of Intelisys’ Pre-AMP’d Marketing Forum the day before.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email James Anderson or connect with him on LinkedIn. |
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