If ever there was a time to step back from “business as usual” and look at new ways to work with your reseller partners, now is the time! It doesn’t take a crystal ball to know that customers of all sizes are going to go through a belt tightening exercise over the next months - once they move past the current panic stage. IT budgets are certainly going to be hit hard, which means that your reseller partners are going to be selling fewer products, which in turn, of course, means that you’ll be selling fewer products. 

Now I’m a big believer in “if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten”. And let’s face it, even in good times most resellers haven’t been knocking the proverbial ball out of the park when it comes to selling your products and solutions. Most vendors have pretty much chosen to ignore the fact that a very large percentage of their reseller partners really don’t know how to sell beyond the training that they received in how to “sell” your products. Most of their sales people are clueless when it comes to discussing a customer’s business needs, or showing the customer how a proposed solution will help that customer reduce expenses or generate additional revenue or give them a competitive advantage or increase profitability.

Unfortunately, in tough financial times, customers aren’t likely to spend money - period! If they are going to let loose of dollars, it will be for solutions that are going to help them survive. And we know that many unified communication solutions can actually be shown to address at least one of the “big 4″ needs mentioned above.  So here’s the opportunity that I see for unified communication vendors….. and other data or voice vendors as well.

Granted it would be prudent to have a reseller channel capable of selling UC solutions.  However, present economic conditions will put the channel into survival mode without the time or funds needed to reshape their sales force quickly.  As vendors, we can shake our heads and watch sales go down; or we can rapidly take some smaller steps to ensure that our channel keeps selling. Here’s one significant step that you can take.  Create tools for your reseller channel that very specifically identify:

• Each general business need/problem that your product plays a role in addressing
• How your product addresses that need (even if it’s as part of a whole solution)
• Where the customer can expect to see cost savings or improvements. Better yet, give them a template for creating an ROI specific to your product/solution.

And if you can do it for vertical markets, better yet!

Think outside the box!  Because the box was built for a different economic environment, as noted on my website (www.sierrasummitgroup.com).  And to tell the truth, that “box” wasn’t entirely appropriate for the UC reseller channel anyway. 

Tags: Unified Communications Information, Unified Communications Information //