Category: Selling

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, WhatsApp’s asynchronous sessions are 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, Learning, partnership, Personal Management, Sales, Selling, training

Practice (alone) does not make perfect

Like all walks of life – work, sport, school – if you are practicing the wrong things, or the wrong way of doing something, you are simply repeating your errors over and over – frustrating and clearly limiting your success.

So how do you stay on track with the right things to practice? Clearly a good start point is to exercise good self discipline. This is the foundation for any personal development. Thinking that the issue is “not my fault” and the issue is caused by something “out there somewhere” is a sure fire way to have reduced control of your life. The first step therefore is to take control of yourself and your discipline including your thoughts and “self-talk”. Be sure to catch yourself talking positively with a “can do” attitude, and stop the cannot do and self limiting speak.
Finding a good coach is a smart step too – whether this is within your current role or an objective outsider. A good coach understands that as an individual, you already have all the necessary resources available to you, but they are the difference, that makes the difference.
For example, if I’m playing golf and struggling to get the results I desire, it probably makes sense to have a coach watch what I do in order to help reflect the areas for improvement – I recall this very real example where the golf pro explained to me (after watching me for a while) that he saw the problem with my game. He noted that I was trying to hit the ball…. Seemed initially to be a ridiculous comment…on closer inspection however, he was absolutely right. He went on to explain to me that if I swing the club, the club will hit the ball…. He moved my focus away from my desire to knock the ball into next week (and missing badly), into simply swinging the club accurately and all would work out.. On this occasion, I saw an instant improvement, but of course, the challenge is to keep making those improvements regularly and being consistent. This is something that your coach can bring to your performance.
This same coaching approach will produce a similar effect in sales. The challenge is that many sales managers and business owners are not well equipped to fulfill his role, so your best option is to find an external coach and develop the right habits.

Business, Learning, partnership, Sales, Selling

Transformation – things have changed

Digital transformation means many different things to different people and there is a glut of offerings in the market currently that promise you a life of luxury if you take their latest solution for your transformation journey. One of the most impactful solutions that I have witnessed is one I will write about here; It’s from a vendor called Nureva and is available exclusively here in the UK from distributor Ascentae.

Nureva Span is a cloud-based software (and hardware) solution – simply a licence that enables collaboration on any device anywhere you can connect to the internet.

So what?

Well this is the really cool part (as if that wasn’t already cool enough) – Span is a virtual canvas – a virtual white board that allows users from wherever they are, to write, draw, or place virtual Post-IT™ notes onto the virtual board. Share desktop content, add comments with virtual INK, and even follow other users who are leading a discussion – so you are quite literally ALL ON THE SAME PAGE. All users connected to the “canvas” see all of added content and contributions, as you would if you were all in the same office sticking physical notes onto a physical wall and writing comments with a marker pen.

Because th

is is a virtual canvas, there is no issue with Post-IT™ notes falling off the wall, or the issue that many security conscious business experience, in that the physical office with the physical Post-IT™ notes must be secured when empty and cannot be accessed….. With Span, you simply close the canvas and it is secure.

Take this to another level, and SPAN can be used on physical touch screen panels – multiple panels connected in software to provide a scrolling wall covering of virtual canvas. Huge real-estate for collaborators to work together on, in the same location, joined by remote participants in other locations with similar hardware components, or sat on a lounger connected via Wi-Fi or 4G on an iPad or similar device…..

This opens so many possibilities for commercial enterprises as well as for education – imagine a collaboration session finishing without the need to take your smartphone and take photos of the walls for some poor sole to spend several hours deciphering and writing up to share amongst the collaborators – That is digital transformation

Interested to learn more or perhaps have a demonstration – then drop me a note and I’ll be happy to arrange