Opportunity Awaits Those Who Plan Ahead

The IT industry as a whole is upbeat about the prospect that convergence technology holds for both SMB`s and enterprise business in South Africa. There has been a notable shift in perception and deployment, with the market moving away from asking- is IP convergence the way to go - to, when and how can we successfully upgrade and rollout. Inline with this change, Westcon AME has been placing strategic bets on which markets and opportunities to engage on, with their partners. Imran Ebrahim, Director of Gauteng and Africa Sales for Westcon AME, believes that resellers have to be cognisant of these market shifts when planning their sales strategy.

With the impressive productivity and cost benefits that can be derived from convergence technology, the traditional IT purchase decision maker in the organisation is now getting pressure from the other operational heads (Sales, HR, Customer Service, Security, etc) as they are realising that IT can redefine business processes and enhance competitive advantage, as opposed to just being quick Internet access and firewalls. There is a heightened awareness of mobility and IP Telephony solutions and this has forced the traditional IT decision maker to become informed about different technologies and the advantages they hold. This has lead to a departure from the traditional `vendor-push IT value chain` and we now see end-users calling for assistance and input, pulling products through the channel.

Vendors traditionally created the demand at the end user and this in turn would stimulate the chain to fulfil its responsibility. This is not happening effectively any more and vendor feet have become `less on the street`, thus creating the opportunity for resellers to leapfrog themselves up the value chain.

The impact of this shift has been evident in the changing role of the Product Managers at Westcon AME, who are now taking on the role of what, traditionally, was seen as that of the vendor. Our business development managers have invested in growing their depth of knowledge and skills, with their respective vendors, enabling them to fuel the demand for technology and generate leads for our partners. We envision that successful resellers will adopt the same approach. As a support, Westcon AME introduced the Westcon Academy, which offers technology agnostic training for resellers, allowing them to understand the true value of the solutions and build solid business cases for their implementation. End-users are calling for expertise and are looking for resellers to challenge and supplement their strategy, as opposed to simply delivering boxes.

They key here is to be able offer informed consulting to end-users, where knowledge is vested in technology solutions and not the offerings of a single vendor. Once you have analysed what the specific needs of a particular business are, you can then recommend a specific solution. Resellers who can match consulting, with a proven track record and solid references, will secure a firmer business model through customer retention. This approach is geared towards maintaining lucrative double-digit margins.

From analysing our databases, we are steering our partners towards the migration business, as a way to get a foot in the door, to push new products and converged solutions that will enable secure wireless and voice solutions for the end user.

Regulations such as King II and the ECT Act place the onus on companies to make sure that they are safe and secure. If something goes wrong or confidential information is leaked onto the Internet, for example, as a result of a virus, worm or hacker, the organization in question will ultimately be held responsible. The evolution of security threats has made investing in rules based security for all the mobile devices in the organisation, a critical purchase for businesses that vest their advantage in their data. As IDC cleverly puts it, a company only has excellent security in place when nobody hears about it. Successful resellers will be the ones who leverage the fear factor that exists, in terms of the network being compromised from within.

A key opportunity remains targeting the deployment of convergence, on 100 Mbps plus connections and upgrade the older LANs from 10/100 to 100/1000 and further more, to extend LANs to Wireless. With a proven track record and an attractive ROI, converged video, voice and data networks sell themselves. Or do they?

IT is now mission critical for most business, doors will only be opened to those resellers who have the credentials to competently service the needs of that client and certification is critical. Westcon AME is investing in the success of their partners by supporting them in terms of certification, so that they can be fast tracked up the various vendor status tiers. Specialisation is not known to end users who are the investors in purchasing technology. End users need to have the knowledge and comfort that partners have been accredited to provide, support and maintain the technology they sell.

However, in adopting this focussed approach, smaller resellers might think that we are encouraging them not to engage larger opportunities. The key here, is to decide what your strengths are and strategically select your go to market partners, to offset your shortfalls in the areas you are not certified to trade in.

Most tenders specifically call for gold or certified partners, therefore smaller resellers need to choose their partners wisely. A downfall of some of the resellers in the market is that they set themselves up for failure, going up against larger competition in tenders that have more skills, experience and certification. Westcon AME has geared its business to support resellers with accredited pre-sales and post-sales support, helping them to win more business, fast-tracking them up the vendor value chain. In enabling this, we have forged a strong relationship with ENS (Enterprise Network Solutions) to bolster the offering of smaller resellers, allowing them to provide professional services, in the form of backup equipment, spares and on site training and installations.

The lesson to be learnt here, is to forge partnerships where different parties bring together different skills, go after realistic and attainable targets and channel your energy and focus on business you can win. The key take out for resellers, is to pick your `can-win battles`, to match your strengths and focus on these opportunities.

For Westcon AME as a business, we have had success in personally engaging our partners and the resellers. In understanding their core business and what processes are involved, we can best find ways to make the solutions we sell, relevant to their business objectives. When compiling sales pitches, we advise our resellers to target productivity, operational efficiency and vulnerability. This focus will elevate IT to being classified as a critical purchase, as opposed to a grudge buy.

This above mentioned advice might seem hard to implement, but John Hurrell, CEO at Westcon AME, gives an example of this dynamic thinking. "Often resellers are faced with the problem that the traditional doors are being shut, so we decided to use a different point of entry into the organisation. We set-up a lunch between the CFO of one of our prospective clients in the logistics industry and our own FD. The discussion was elevated beyond bits and bytes, rather focussing on how Westcon AME was able to streamline its own logistics process to shorten the time to market of its partners. Through the launch of Compass, Westcons` ecommerce portal, we now allow our partners to access our live system to, get a quote, place an order, check ETA`s, RMA`s, pull a statement and much more 365 x 24 x 7. This approach proved to be extremely successful and the principle works on the premise that when you can have an advocate in that business pushing the traditional decision maker to invest in an IP infrastructure, you have more weight." The key to this approach was relevancy. It was positioned as a competitive advantage enabler and the actual mechanics of how the solution worked, were not of importance in this forum.

The above mentioned approach is fast gaining momentum and this is evident in the evolution of the traditional IT sales person. Previously, a successful IT salesperson had their competency vested in heavy technical skills. The ability to succeed and close a large sale now resides in their ability to seek the potential areas that IT can truly drive a competitive advantage, over and above having an attractive ROI. The role of the CIO is rapidly changing and resellers need to invest in the development of business skills for their sales people, in order to make their sales pitch more relevant to business. We have seen that one of our most successful resellers has even gone as far to send their key sales people for basic business management courses.

However, the risk in industries where competitive advantage is vested in people with specific knowledge and skills, there is often a fertile ground for poaching and head hunting.