Category: Sales

Business, channel, Customer Experience, Customer Focus, partnership, Sales

Physical exhibition events are back it seems

Very recently (well about 7 weeks ago to be more precise), we participated in the annual Channel Live expo, held at the NEC in Birmingham.

We have exhibited there a few times with our partners and had some decent engagement, and this time was no exception. In fact, I would chalk this one down as one of the most successful, in terms of actual potential partnership opportunities for our current vendor partner Inovo Telecom.

AI and Automation

My business partner and I had been asked to participate this year, as presenters for a couple of the theatre topics – “AI and Automation”; and “Creating Sticky Customers”.

Despite it being quite some time since presenting to an audience like this, I was really excited and as a result hugely enjoyed my session, which is a topic I have a particular passion for anyway (thankfully)

Both sessions can be viewed below or via our Youtube channel (QR code connects)

QR code to Trust Business Partners Youtube channel

Presentation recordings here

Enjoy

Business, channel, partnership, Sales, Selling

Are you a number one, or a number two?

Change or become irrelevant

As someone who gets to see a lot of new technology early, I’m often excited by the possibilities this affords our channel friends and colleagues.

How about you? Are you

1. Equally stoked by the opportunity of engaging with your customers to share an exciting new solution?

2. Not too fussed and prefer to stick to your core product or solution offer?

If you’re the second option here, then I’d urge you to consider this…

Your customers are investing in technology that you’re not providing and whilst they’re not talking to you, they’re building relationships and trust elsewhere. This carries risk for you as other suppliers are option 1 players and they’re following a LAND AND EXPAND strategy that will see them displacing you at some point.

Now let’s reconsider.. are you 1 or 2?

Business, channel, Customer Experience, partnership, Sales, Selling

Channel Partner tips – Before you start.

Make sure you’re really clear about the road ahead and that you are sure you’re “up for the challenge”. It’s not simply a case of “build it and they will come”.

If you’ve done your preparation well, the rewards are there with a great execution. But don’t even think about “playing at it”

The start before the start
Business, Sales, Selling

Is this a pivotal moment?

Image courtesy of https://www.dreamstime.com/farbentek_info

#COVIDー19 has caused mass disruption to every area of our society and we’re seeing major gatherings being understandably cancelled or with very poor attendance. We’re also seeing businesses taking decisions to stop their employees from traveling, even into the office. As a result, we’re all turning to alternative means to come together and unsurprisingly, vendors of said technologies are offering tactical solutions for those who are not well equipped. For many this will be little more than “business as usual”, but for significant numbers, this will be a massive change. The nature of the enforced change causes me to wonder if this will perhaps prove to be a very pivotal moment in history, when video calling and video conferencing, and collaboration realty comes of age…. Time will tell

Business, channel, Customer Experience, Customer Focus, partnership, Sales, Selling

How Koopid.Ai are disrupting the Contact Centre space

Here’s a short video explainer for Koopid.ai – and we’re exhibiting at the Call and Contact Centre Expo at the Excel on March 18th and 19th, so please come and say hello and learn more. This could be what your customers have been waiting for.

Want to chat? Then call us on 0800 999 1882 or mail me graham@koopid.ai

Thanks for reading and hope to connect soon- or to see the solution in action – click here

Business, channel, Sales, Selling

Podcast Episode #1 – Aligning sales and marketing, and entering a new market

Listen to Sales & Marketing – Aligned for success – Podcast #1 by Graham Bunting & Dave Pitts from Trust Business Partners on #SoundCloud Delivered in partnership with Nigel and Liz from SalesXchange

Inaugural #Podcast for Dave and Graham of trust business partners
Business, Sales, Selling

Finding customers for your products, or products for your customers?

We all know that it’s smarter and easier to offer more solutions to your current customers than to seek out new clients who don’t yet know you and what you stand for.

It costs 5x as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one

With this in mind, I’m introducing a few ideas that you may be interested in adding to your mix….

Introducing Inovo Telecom, as a total customer experience solution to expand your customers’ customers’ engagement options in a fully integrated platform whatever channel they chose to engage in. A fully supported sales motion too from a fully engaged team. Simply introduce the idea and once your customer says go ahead and tell me more, we will appear as if by magic by your side. And the best bit – you help your customer, keep out competition and earn margin – what’s not to like

artificial intelligence to augment your customer engagement options

Adding any digital channel and orchestrating with persistence powered by AI and human agents.

Customers hate to queue and listen to tired music on hold looped around and around interspersed with your queue position – they really do. Offering them a lifeline to a digital service can be the tonic they require. Many choose this as default too (I certainly do), engaging at their preferred time and pace (perhaps whilst on a train – a WhatsApp’s asynchronous session is a boon). Ensuring the conversation persists is critical, such that any channel movement (say to an agent) is accompanied by the entire conversation for full context, and avoidance of the nauseating repetition of the same details over and over arrrggghhhh 🙄😡

The Terminator

To learn more – just drop me a note and “I’ll be back” in touch in no time

Fill out the form below to get in touch.

Business, partnership, Sales, Selling

Growing my business is hard

I’d start from the premise of aiming to sell more things to more people. In practice this can result in a range of actions. One of those can be a cooperative sales motion and one could be to expand your portfolio, so that your clients can source multiple products and services from you. If they’ve already bought, they’re likely to buy from you again. Cooperative selling is where you’re partnering with another similar business with complementary offerings and you simply look to sell to each others’ client. I’m seeing a marked increase in this latter approach.

If you a bereft of ideas or simply feel are stuck – drop me a line. Always happy to help

Business, partnership, Sales, Selling

How do I stay on top of the constant changes?

#TrustInPartnership

Whatever your perspective, I think we would all probably agree, that for the IT and Telecoms reseller, things have certainly changed, and continue to do so. The vendor landscape continues to evolve too, with new vendors appearing, with innovative offerings, and many established vendors consolidating as they vie for position in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

For the consumers of the technology (the customers), things are forever changing too. Factors affecting their businesses are arriving at such a pace, and with their business cost base being under constant pressure, many are running on very lean staffing numbers. This compounds to effect somewhat.

What we have is more change and a greater pace of change, more vendors, more innovation, fewer staff, greater challenges and the same amount of time in each and every day.

How does a business stay on top of all of this and remain current with technology that can give them an advantage, or stop them being exposed, as well as attract and retain staff as a great place to work.

In life, and in business, for me, it’s about relationships – building trusted relationships, where over time you can outsource some of this to a specialist or specialists – ensuring you can focus on the business of running your business – and generally, the smaller specialist businesses are more likely to offer you the long term relationship building opportunity, as they are more often than not, owner-run and they are therefore unlikely to leave the business to work at a competitor, leaving you with the what to do dilema.

#ShopLocal #BuyLocal #SupportLocal #TrustInPartnerships

Business, channel, Compliance, Customer Focus, Leadership, partnership, Sales

Accreditation – A burden or a blessing

Vendor accreditation programmes – who are they really for?

1. Customers?
2. Channel partners?
3. Vendors?
4. All three?

Why does a customer care if their supplier is accredited by the vendor of the product, solution or service?
Why does a channel partner care whether they are Bronze, Silver, or Gold certified?
Why does the vendor need to create training and certification material, courses, tests etc?

It all sounds a lot of work, so why does anyone bother?

There must be some significant value in order to motivate everyone to care enough to get engaged – so what is it?

Customers are what this is all about! Customers require good advice from well informed representatives from the channel community and the channel community cannot rely on the resources of the vendor at every engagement they have, so the channel partners need to become equally well informed – This requires training and testing, which is great for the vendor, because they end up with well informed channel partners representing them and provides the scale required to develop more market coverage. In addition, an accreditation programme usually has a volume\revenue related metric, which rewards the successful sales partner – more of a value component than a quality component and an often thorny topic for engineering heavy partners with lots of skills but not too many new sales. Customers are usually able to see for themselves what partner accreditations are for channels and select based on a value\quality blend. In reality most customers want to know they will be well looked after rather than well sold to.
For the vendor, an accreditation programme provides a sense for channel partner commitment levels and focus on their portfolio, and training enables current knowledge to be maintained and product knowledge to be broadly well ingrained. The more a channel partner commits to one vendor programme, the less time and resources they will have for competing offers – stands to reason. So vendors see this as an important dynamic for developing partner commitments. Ultimately this enables scale and quality delivery for the customers and commitment for the vendor, with the reseller having the ability to wrap services and complementary products to their solution.