Comms industry hears that customers already know all about suppliers, and what to check how well the supplier understands their business Resellers should adopt a consultative model as both vendors and their products becoming more customer-focused.
Customers are looking to drive out costs, become more efficient and gain a competitive edge by becoming far more responsive and flexible in their use of technology, and buying behaviours in the business environment have become greatly influenced by the Internet.
So much so that buyers could be 70% of the way through a sales cycle before they engage with a supplier. They are more aware of their pain points and supply options than ever before and this is forcing organisations to align their go-to-market strategies to a new breed of purchaser.
Speaking at Comms Vision 2014, the UK Comms channel's premier strategic business planning convention (November 5th-7th) Martyn Etherington, Mitel's Chief Marketing Officer & Chief of Staff, outlined the vendor's efforts to focus on customer needs in order to become more relevant to today's buyers and he thinks resellers would also benefit from taking the same approach.
"We have to change the way we sell," he told delegates. "The way people buy and consume technology has changed. We need to understand the customer, how they buy and where they are in their purchasing journey."
One of its leading competitors and a failed recent acquisition target, ShoreTel seems to have come to a similar conclusion in terms of the need to focus on customer requirements but is coming at it from an architectural and product development perspective. According to Adrian Hipkiss (above), Vice President and Managing Director for Shoretel in EMEA this means providing a Hybrid solution. Deciding on a delivery model shouldn't just be a question of weighing up the advantages of both on-premise or cloud solutions. The sensible approach is to offer real choice by adding a hybrid component, he argues.
"The challenge is that on-premise and the cloud do not provide customers with a real choice. Customers want simplicity, low risk, flexibility and more options. There is strong demand for an enterprise-class hybrid service, and our partners looked to us to provide a platform as a service," he says.
As well as delivery methods converging on a single platform, social and corporate environments are also coming together and customers are increasingly choosing their communications tools, are intolerant of failure, they want feature richness and they expect their reseller to be consultative.