Conversation is the greatest sales tool of all time and the insurance policy for customer satisfaction. Asking the right questions is how you’ll discover what’s important to the customer, what challenges they have, the business problems they need solving, and how you can help them gain capabilities that will benefit the organization. This is the difference between being the person who checks a box on their list and being the person who takes away the need for a list altogether. We’re talking more lucrative opportunities, more engagement, and potentially a much longer-lasting client relationship.
Let me set the 2022 Sandler Partners National Summit stage where Michelle Labern, Regional Channel Manager; Justin Noller, Director, Channel, New England; Ben Magday, Director, Channel, Mid-Atlantic; and I started with a “role-play case study” that showed how going a little deeper, with simple standard questions, can yield some extremely actionable information.
As a Sandler Partner, you can address any of your customers’ requirements by selling across the stack. Cloud Computing. Voice and Collaboration. UCaaS. Contact Center. SD-WAN. Network. Security. IoT and Wireless. Managed Services. You have access to over 200 Providers, with hundreds of possible solutions. You also have us, the Sales Engineering team, Sales Support, and Channel Managers to help you along. In a few minutes, you can touch on a few of these categories or potentially hit all nine, and the more you talk, the more you’ll hear. There’s almost always an opportunity to dive deeper. The hardest part is getting the initial meeting. So why not take advantage of it and really cement yourself as their go-to solution expert across the stack?
The fictional client we discussed, a small HVAC company, presented an initial opportunity of replacing a legacy appliance with 100 seats, which would mean a potential deal of $3,000 max. That’s great, but you can do better. Residuals. SPIFFs. Additional reoccurring revenue. This is going wide. The customer is going to be having these conversations eventually, probably with someone else. If you have it in that moment, you can save them the hassle and know that you’re probably giving them more choices and refinements than if they were talking directly with a specific vendor who sells a very narrow array of products — products that potentially could conflict with what you supply, causing you a headache in the future!
So how much is that $3,000 deal worth if you can sell across the stack? Five times the amount? Ten times? Thirty times? You won’t know until you start asking questions and learning about their business. As an Engineer, I love to geek out and talk about the technology, but for the customer, the technology is what helps their organization concentrate on their core business. If it’s a background function, they want it to stay in the background. If it’s something upfront, they want it to make life easier and faster and deliver so they can concentrate on what they need to concentrate on. Having this larger holistic response will serve them better, and that’s the win-win of selling across the sales stack. And again, we’re here to help.
The session continued, and the conversation became more tactical. Thank you to Michelle, Ben, and Justin — you’re selling across the stack every day, and it’s great to hear how you talk to customers and become their trusted Partners. You don’t need to be up on every technology. As part of the Sandler Partners community, you have the support you need. During this session, we also had a Q&A with the audience, which was another example of conversation that provided a lot of insights. Check out the session recording to hear all this and more with additional detail.
Want to learn more about selling across the sales stack, the support you can receive from the Sales Engineering team, or hop on an initial orientation call – email Andy directly at [email protected]. You can also learn more about the team by visiting the Sales Engineering page on our website, or reach out to [email protected] and we’ll get right back to you!
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