Unified Communications - Who’s Going to Sell It?
Manufacturers are jumping on the Unified Communications bandwagon! It doesn’t matter if the manufacturer is from the traditional voice or data worlds or was already involved in “convergence” – they all want to have a role in “unified communications”. All very well and good – because customers can actually realize distinct business benefits from integrating back office processes with front end communications. But…..who is going to sell unified communication solutions? Manufacturers are looking to their existing VAR or telecom partners – or new reseller partners – to take UC solutions to the end-user.
At a recent event for one distributor’s top resellers, I had the opportunity to talk with resellers – most of them from a traditional telcom dealer background – about the opportunities that UC presented for resellers. Their reaction was pretty universal…. “we don’t know how to sell this type of complex solution”. And I believe they represent the majority of resellers today, where the sales staff has little, if any, experience doing the type of selling required by UC solutions.
After observing the reseller channel struggle with the sales of convergence products (VoIP, etc.), I can’t help but wonder when manufacturers will step up to the plate to ensure that their own resellers have the wherewithal to properly train their sales staff in a consultative or customer-centric type sales. Selling boxes didn’t work well with convergence…. it REALLY won’t work with unified communications.
Step up, vendors! What can you do to ensure that your reseller partners are successful in UC sales?
Pam,
No big surprise about the VAR communities problems with UC. I encountered the same lack of redirection with a group of vars that I spoke about the opportunities and challenges of UC.
There are several big changes involved when moving from selling traditional, CPE based person-to-person telephony to multimodal, mobile UC applications and services. Aside from the added complexity of software, UC also enables business process applications to become contact initiators to people through any mode of contact, including phone calls. This is being particularly popularized by Avaya under the label of Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) .
At the Avaya Analyst Conference in Boston last week, I raised the question of what Avaya was doing for its sales channels to get them up to speed for UC and CEBP. They indicated that VAR retraining is being offered to upgrade their skills from selling boxes to helping customers identify application needs, designing solutions (with help from consulting services), and planning a graceful migration to a UC environment. This migration may well involve hosted and managed services, which the channels will also be expected to “resell.”
This may be a difficult transition for traditional VARs, since it will push them into the business application data world, not just wired telephony switches and endpoint devices for voice communications.