Direct and Indirect Sales

1
Direct and Indirect Sales

• We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance
  planet and, amid all the forms of life that
  surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made
  an alliance with us.
• 
  Maurice Maeterlinck

2
Direct and Indirect Models

• Session Objectives
• Identify the best route to market
• Establish yourself as part of a broader
  partnership
• Discuss possible partnership synergies

• Discussion Topics
• Impression Selling
• Vertical Markets
• Industry trends in partnering
• Distribution

2
3
Go Deep Within Verticals

• The key to vertical penetration is playing at the
  business level, not at the SKU/IT
  product/hardware/software level. Sell business
  benefits and ROI. Dont sell as a cost center.

4
Qualifying Leads in Pipeline Low Hanging Fruit

• Identify and focus on prospects actively
  investigating
• Mobile phone solutions
• VPN connectivity
• Mobile data products
• Managed firewall / managed security solutions
• Anti-spam, anti-virus, message filtering
• Archiving and data retention

5
Is SaaS an SMB Only Play?
Firemans Fund
Medical Device
Aerospace
Adobe
Royal Caribbean
McDonalds
Kinaxis
Defense
Boeing
Automotive
Authoria
SC Johnson
Plantronics
Electronics
High Tech
Unocal
Roche
Prudential
Darden Restaurants
Pfizer
Reuters
Avnet
American Express
150 of the Fortune 1000
Ketera
IBM
United
Dell
Concur
JC Penney
GMAC
Delta
Northrop Grumman
Eaton Corp
Texas Instruments
6
Uncovered Pain Equals Opportunity Sample
Questions

• How much unwanted email and SPAM hits your
  average email box every day?
• How do you address regulations and business
  concerns about archiving?
• If an employee laptop is lost or stolen, can
  mail be recovered?
• Describe how documents are shared and revised
  among employees and partners?
• How do you coordinate schedules and plan meetings?

7
Sell to Existing Customers

• Mine your existing customer base to uncover
  Hosted Exchange opportunities
• Offer attractive service bundles
• Provide seamless integration throughout customer
  experience
• Stay in touch with best customers
• Recommend offerings based on current needs,
  business situations
• Deliver new services regularly

8
Overcoming Objections Be Ready!
Objection Response
You will increase price once Im hooked on the service. Offer fixed rates for long-term contracts or pre-payment.
Ive heard hosted response times are quite slow. Provide performance metrics based on broadband capability. Potentially offer to host a subset to demonstrate speed.
I have more control with an internal solution. Emphasize pre-packaged administrative consoles and reporting.
Im concerned about privacy and security. Emphasize bundled anti-virus/anti-spam. Educate them on backup and disaster recovery features. Have well-defined privacy policy.
My current solution is free or less expensive. If internal, emphasize cost of downtime, expertise required, etc. If hosted, emphasize value-add features like shared calendar and global address.
9
Optimizing Sales Strategy
Sales Organization Issues How to Address
Target sales messaging is industry/event specific Create a subset of Business Solutions sales specialists who are educated on mapping features/functionality to an industrys needs.
Customers have significant migration concerns Enable sales teams with defined migration plans (for multiple starting scenarios) versus staffing expensive, up-front sales engineering support.
Customers want predictable pricing/contracts Ensure sales teams understand and are empowered to speak about how prices will change for a service in 12 and 24 months without having to check with management.
Significant inbound interest must be web/self-service generated Implement a self-service customer needs assessment/qualification questionnaire and train the sales team to respond with scenario-based sales.
10
Sales Organizational Roles
Sales Organization Role Key Functions
Inside Sales / Telesales Demand generation and awareness. Follow-up sales for inbound self-service customers based on needs analysis. Ability to detail features, functionality, pricing and key benefits.
Business Solution Consultants Solution-based selling targeted to the needs of a specific industry or needs segment niche. Feature emphasis only as it pertains to solving the customers problems.
Sales Engineering Support Top-level support for security, migration and interface questions and clarification. For those If we can answer this, will you sign customer situations.
Migration Consultants If applicable, pre-sales/solution support for defining roadmap and project plan for migration.
11
Sales Compensation

• Structure revenue plans to motivate reps to sell
  annuity model of hosted service
• Consider compensating reps for 6-month of fees
  upon implementation and then monthly after that
• Look at migration services and up-front
  implementation fees to cover sales compensation
  costs
• Map sales compensation to level-of-effort
• Create incentives for long-term or volume
  contracts
• Research partner compensation strategies for
  motivation to sell your offering
• Consider incremental spiff through channel to
  ensure focus and commitment

12
Evangelize your Sales People

• Share goals and objectives, understand where you
  can help each other
• Give them easy tools, simplify your Hosted
  Exchange offering for them
• 80/20 rule identify the top 20 that do 80 of
  the business and nurture them
• Reward desired performance and selling behaviors
• Make sure they use Outlook/Exchange so they
  experience the power themselves

13
No Provider Is An Island

• If youre afraid of losing your world to the
  competition and that fear keeps you from
  partnering to bring about best-in-class solutions
  to go deep, youre going to lose your world.

14
Impression Selling with a Channel

• A web-centric model opens itself to effective
  channel and reseller sales, but the risk of
  losing control of the impressions is very real.
  Consider the following
• Own the collateral and materials. Consider
  providing white-labeled materials, including all
  web-page materials (copy, graphics, tours, etc.)
  to promote consistency of messaging and use.
  Could you even host those pages for your
  partners?
• Determine how far along in a sales cycle you need
  to take the customer before passing to a channel.
  Are there early, critical impressions that you
  must control to set expectations for delivery
  later?
• Use the impression selling concept to understand
  how the channels are selling. Have they
  identified a better selling route, and can you
  replicate it?

15
Take Advantage of the IT Ecosystem

• Software Players
• Other ISVs/Peers
• Industry Groups
• Databases
• Data Warehousing
• Security
• Mobile Operators
• Hardware Vendors

• Consultants
• Silicon Vendors
• Infrastructure Providers
• Contract Manufacturers
• Hosting Providers
• Resellers
• Telecom Service Providers
• Microsoft

16
Objective

• Drive Sales at a Lower Cost