Why You Are NOT Selling Cloud - Telecom Version

If you’ve read my other posts on LI you may be saying…”wait, I thought you said to ‘Stop Selling Cloud!’”  You’d be correct, I did say that. If you go back and read that post again I believe you’ll get the full meaning of what I was saying there.

Every couple of weeks I travel around the country to work with our Sales Partners and help them build or bolster their cloud practices. This post is meant to be a challenge to those current and future Sales Partners. It could be applicable to folks outside that specific demographic and if that’s you, then that’s good to go. But I’d like to focus on these folks specifically.

Let’s start by drawing a picture of your current business. You started your company 5, 10, 15, maybe even 20 years ago b/c you were tired of investing your efforts and relationship building skills into fattening the pockets of the ownership of the ISP or CLEC that you were working for. After a 3, 5 or 8 years “in the grind” working for a couple of different companies you realized that the customers weren’t really buying your companies’ products (most of which were “me too” offerings), but they were buying YOU! Regardless of which carrier or regional play you were representing, they continued to buy from you b/c they trusted YOU. They trusted your knowledge of the industry, your integrity, your true desire to help, and most importantly your understanding of THEIR business and how the products you currently represented could meet their needs for today and for the future.

You may have originated on the “Direct” or the “Channel” side, but either way you figured out that there were providers and carriers out there who were willing to pay for what you’d built…the all-important RELATIONSHIPS with your clients. You talked to a couple of mentors and your top customers. Your mentors validated your epiphany and at least a few key customers told you they’d be willing to “follow” you on the next step of your journey. They were even excited by the prospect of working with you on a wider array of services than the carrier you currently represented. Once you’d established that there was a path forward you talked to your significant other and received the ultimate BUY-IN. On your way out you scooped up a couple of other “hunters” and maybe (if you were VERY LUCKY) even an engineer to join you. Finally you talked to your buddy at a Master and told him of your plan. He/she helped you to understand how much you could realistically make on your own and what level of support you could expect from them and the providers in their portfolio.

You're now on your own, doing your own thing and finally building a business. Those first couple of years were very tight. The residuals started off slow. Two of the three customers you’d talked to before making the shift had changes at the executive levels and your champions moved on to new pursuits. But there was that one who stayed and, true to their word, they brought you in everywhere that it made sense for their business. Good thing you made that hunter a partner in your company and they bought your vision. While you continued to work those “known” accounts and rebuilt relationship with the new leadership they were out there filling the funnel with NetNew opportunities.  Some of which you hadn’t even envisioned. 

Now the importance of that Master Agency you selected really became apparent. The opportunities you and your team were uncovering and working were far beyond the original training you’d received in your past lives.  You started to get a little nervous. Especially if you didn’t have an engineer or tech-type join you early-on. You leaned heavily on your Master Agency and the providers they represented for you.  You focused on what you did best, TAKE CARE OF THE CUSTOMER and align them with BEST OF BREED PROVIDERS. You stayed in very close communication with all of your providers and asked your Master Agency for guidance. They obliged and continued to push you and your team forward. Next thing you knew you’d made it through the launch and rollout of the MPLS and you’d become a known entity in your market in that space. Your peers in the area started to reach out to share war stories and seek your wise counsel. All the while your residual base continued to grow and you were finally back to making somewhere close to what you made that last year before you went out on your own. You continued to invest in your company and make strategic hires. You hired an admin team to handle orders and escalations.  You hired a sales leader (or two) to continue to grow the base. If you originally didn’t have an engineer, now you invested in one (or at least a more tech-savvy overlay for your sales team).  You started to hit your stride. It was year 3 and you were happy with the trajectory of your company and your growing revenues.

Fast forward a few more years…now maybe you’ve hit a plateau. Revenues continue to grow, but not like the hockey-stick you experienced at the beginning. Your Master Agency (or let’s admit it…Master AGENCIES!) continue to bring you new offerings and push you to position the latest and greatest that the providers are coming out with. VoIP…Oh VoIP! Really?!? Customers are supposed to trust someone else to manage and support the infrastructure that drives their all-important company communications?!? Admittedly, it took you a while to fully buy-in to this next-gen offering for your clients. This was partly b/c of the revenues and margins that you were recognizing on the hardware and services from the traditional on-prem telephony solutions you built your company on. The other side of it was the fact that you’d heard one or two nightmare stories about a failed deployment with one provider or another and you weren’t about to risk the relationships you’d built with an untested and shaky solution option. Begrudgingly you started offering these options only when the customer asked for them specifically. You continued to offer an on-prem option and trained your team to position the value of that option over “HOSTED”. Try as you may to prevent it, more and more of your customers continued to request and then deploy HOSTED solutions. You even lost a few deals b/c you weren’t as dialed-in to this as you could have been.

Fast forward a little more (5-7 years depending upon your market)…Hosted PBX is pretty much a standard. You’re still offering on-prem solutions and your team is well-versed at proselytizing the benefits of on-prem vs. HOSTED, but you continue to see the adoption growing. Slowly…at the urging of your Master Agency and everything you’re reading online, you evolve your model to comp your team the same (or maybe even better) on HOSTED than what you pay on on-prem solutions. B/c let’s admit it, you realized that even though the front-end CAPEx margins are better on on-prem, you have to invest A LOT more into the management and support of those systems than the HOSTED solutions you’ve sold/deployed. You’re feeling good about this shift. You even work with your Marketing Department (congrats on hiring those two people last year!) to put out some fluff that rebrands your org as a “Cloud Solutions Company”.  After all, you’re now selling HOSTED, and that’s a cloud use-case. You get some decent hits on the website and you even get a few new leads for HOSTED voice. At the same time, you start getting requests for “Cloud” that neither you nor anyone on your team knows what the HELL they’re talking about or asking for. You run a few of these discoveries to dig in with the prospect and get a better understanding of what they’re looking for. You understand, but you don’t think you have a play. Or it’s too far outside of your “core” for you to comfortably pursue, so you NO-BID a few great revenue opportunities and chalk it up to growing pains. You decide to focus on what you and your team are really good at and you continue to watch your revenues increase (ever-so-slightly) and you’re happy with where you are.

Fast-forward 2 more years…now you’re confused and a little bit concerned. You may still be sitting at the plateau where you were 2 years ago. You’ve retooled your comp and your model to meet the HOSTED demands of your customers, but now that space is very crowded. HOSTED voice has created a junction between your business and the business of your local MSPs and VARs. They used to sell the compute stuff and you were the voice/data guy. Now they’re winning hosted deals over you! WHAT THE HELL?!?

You turn to your Master Agency and they express the same concerns that you have. They talk about how they’re trying to align with those guys, but it’s a different message and a different kind of relationship. You talk to the providers and they’re no help b/c they’re just happy to have the market-share regardless of where it’s coming from. So you buckle down and keep focusing on your “core” and hope that it’ll all just even out.

Now it’s 2015 and you continue to slowly grow your business. Over the past couple of years you and your leadership team have realized that your sales volumes have to continue to increase in order to hit your projections. The margins are getting thinner and thinner as the commoditization continues.

You spend more time on LinkedIn and other sites reading about what’s going on in the industry. You’re looking for a pivot which will make sense for your company and your base. Your customers continue to ask for more and more “cloud services”. You’ve sold a few Hosted Exchange deals, even sold a backup deal on one of your providers’ IaaS. Those deals were relatively smooth, but the provider rep you’d been working with just left and started his own company (or went to a different provider).

So here we are…I’m working for a CCaaS Provider and helping my Service Providers to truly build a Cloud Contact Center Practice and you’re reading this article looking for a pivot. Maybe it’s time we talk. The harsh reality is that:

If you’re not talking to your customers and prospects about cloud, then someone is.

The space is crowded. Whether they’re talking to one of your local telecom competitors, their IT services firm, their IT hardware/software distributor, or even their copier company. I guarantee you, someone is talking to them about cloud. Wouldn’t you rather that they were talking to you than any of those other options. After all, you’ve spent the last decade and a half (or two) developing and crafting a relationship with them and have achieved the coveted “Trusted Advisor” status on your “core” business. Why let all that go to waste in this new era?

Think back to why you originally broke out on your own. It wasn’t because you had all of the technical answers to every single question your customers had. It was because you realized that the most important thing is the RELATIONSHIP and the TRUST that they’ve extended to you once you earned it by doing good business and meeting their business needs. I know it’s a big leap and that there’s more at risk today than in your start-up days and that it can be intimidating to bring solutions to the table when you don’t fully understand them yourself. That’s why you need to partner with organizations who can truly serve as a force-multiplier for you, your customers and your company. Think back to MPLS and VoIP. You didn’t have all the answers on those tech shifts (still may not), but you’ve sold a TON of it and your customers and company are better for it.

Don’t let fear of the unknown or fear of change hold you back during this explosive time of growth in our industry.

Let me know what I can do to help you today.

Thanks for reading,

Todd Scarborough

@toddscar

[email protected]