The Changing Relationship between Customer and Reseller

Unified communications...we know a lot about the many ways that it can help a business provide better service to its customers or increase sales or reduce some significant expenses or really increase productivity or improve a company’s bottom line. Where we seem to have some difficulty, as an industry, is in figuring out how to get UC tools into the hands of the end-user.    

Customers are most familiar with letting the IT department deal with “computer” related issues – and now often with telecom issues as well. But times have changed. IT departments have seen their budgets slashed. Getting approval for capital expenditures has become much more difficult for that IT department. On the other hand, companies are faced with some significant challenges that cannot be easily ignored:

• Many organizations are trying to do as much or more with a smaller staff
• Some of those same organizations are trying to retain their competitive position by getting products to market faster or by more efficiently controlling their inventory and/or other processes
• And others are trying to find more ways to reduce expenses without cutting services or benefits as they face tighter or smaller budgets.

There’s a tendency among all of us to stick with what or who we know. Trust and loyalty are important – even in the business world. However, in this world where technology is changing so rapidly and providing new and better tools for business, we’re seeing a large gap in the skills and knowledge of many resellers relative to that changing technology. More than ever, customers need to find and work with resellers – VARs, integrators, telecom dealers – who are focused on the customer’s challenges and issues, not on the latest and greatest in technology. That’s not to say, of course, that the reseller doesn’t need to understand how technology translates to business tools. In today’s environment, resellers need greater technical expertise than ever before. But how does a customer find the all-too-rare VAR or integrator or dealer who speaks and understands “business,” yet also has the technical expertise demanded by today’s more complex solutions? Here are a few basic tips that may help in getting the search started:

1. Check their website. Look for case studies that show how they solved a real business problem or addressed a business issue. Do they stress professional services and consulting over product offerings?
2. “Interview” their salesperson. Does he/she ask questions about your business or does he/she ask about the network configuration, etc.? Do they ask business-related questions or do they talk about technology?
3. Ask about their sales process. What steps are involved in their process? Do they talk to line of business managers to uncover business issues or are they content talking to the IT manager? Do they perform a needs analysis? How do they determine the right “solution” for a customer? 
4. Ask for specific examples of business problems that their company has addressed and provided solutions for. Ask for some ROI examples.
5. Do they have a particular area of expertise? Do they focus on your industry so that they have developed a strong understanding of the industry’s unique needs and challenges? Or do they specialize in a specific area of technology – unified messaging, for example – so that they have developed a strong expertise in that area?
6. Are they aligned with one major vendor, so that your needs have to fit what they have to offer; or do they represent a number of vendors so that they can develop the best solution for your specific needs?
7. Can they provide a migration strategy that protects your existing infrastructure investment while still planning for solutions that address your current and future business needs?

Is it safe to assume that the dealer or VAR that a customer has depended on in the past is the best resource to take them into the future – or even address their needs today? Not necessarily! For every VAR, integrator or telecom dealer who has evolved their business model and expanded their technical expertise to enable them to better address the business needs of their customers, there are many more VARs and telecom dealers who are still trying to sell the features of a PBX (even an IP-PBX) or the better technology of a different IT infrastructure.

We’re in a different economic environment than we were in just three years ago. We’re also in a world where technology is presenting us with more and more tools that help us do business better, faster, more effectively. Now the challenge is to find resellers who have evolved with the technology and economic climate so that they can actually fulfill the role of a “trusted advisor” for the growth of a business.