The dependence on technology has accelerated over the past few years with service trades now extremely reliant on solutions from Customer Experience (CX)/support, data collection/analytics, Network/Voice, Connectivity, and more. They are also looking for ways to offer more, gain efficiencies, and increase their competitiveness. In this session attendees heard about changes both across industry and specific to sectors, and the motivations that can help Partners land the deal! If you’ve worked in one vertical, you have the transferable experience to be successful in others.
Eric Beller, SVP Complex Solutions – Central and Dave Povlick, Senior Sales Engineer – Midwest shared the stage and their thoughts with the audience and a Panel of experienced experts. Discussing their solutions, various verticals, and the opportunities available to Partners were Jon Parrish, GoTo Sr. Solutions Consultant; Brian Walters, Kustomer Head of Global Channel; Chris Soucie, NHC Director of Product & Brand; and Joe Rhem, WiredIQ CEO.
“We deeply value Partners that focus in on vertical selling,” states Eric, “these Partners often gain specialization through their experience, knowledge, and client advocacy, which hopefully allows them to stand out, reduces competition, and sell higher value services. We’re always evaluating how we can help Partners sell and market themselves more. If you haven’t accessed the Marketing Center (in the Sandler Portal), talk to your Channel Manager (or) Partner Advocacy person. Inside is a wealth of content – case studies, white papers, email campaigns, landing pages – it’s all stuff you can get for free (as a Partner).”
“(I hope) to open your eyes to a potential vertical you may not be tapping into,” says Jon. “(Automotive) not the manufacturer, but the dealerships. There are hundreds of thousands of dealerships out there (and) customer experience matters to them. SMS, Facebook, Instagram, (inventory control, service scheduling, CRM, and sales tools) are now part of their DNA, and best practices, to survive and grow their business. Dealerships today are looking for growth by leveraging our platform. We have 6% of the (dealers) market and close 70% of deals with Partners.”
Car Buyer Leads
62.6%
Phone
32.4%
Online form
5%
Chat
“If you’re not selling into retail, you really should consider it,” suggests Chris. “The market is huge, there’s over one million retailers in the United States – e-commerce, mom & pop boutiques, convenience stores, (big box, etc.) – totaling $6 trillion in revenue. If your vertical is healthcare, consider retail, it’s very similar. How do you do it? Think about 4 critical things (1) what are the challenges; (2) how they communicate with customers; (3) distribution model; and (4) Regulatory/Compliance. Finally, we all need to ask, for any sale not just retail, what is your goal for the customer? What do you want to do for the customer?”
Design the Right Sales Approach by Considering
- Costs/margins
- Omni-channel communications
- Workforce requirements
- Regulations/compliance (PCI, SOC, GDPR, etc.)
“There’s a modern buyer, and there’s a traditional buyer,” summarizes Brian. “The buying cycle now looks completely different. Personalization, loyalty, and customer service matters. If I have a bad experience with a company, what do I have to do to shop with another company? I open a new tab, google search, find something else and I can purchase from them. We connect across all your tech stack within the Contact Center today, everything gets correlated, when (the customer) reaches out (you know their) past order history, how they were marketed to, agents don’t need to look through multiple tabs, everything is summarized. Everything revolves around the customer, adding efficiencies (and improving efficiencies.”
“Hotels basically need everything (VoIP, cameras, secure WiFi, TV, backups, security, SD-WAN),” states Joe. “What we have, is essentially a hotel in a box. We’re built on top of the AWS network, served across 175 data centers around the world. You can pick up a whole brand, or a whole franchise, they can be in a whole lot of different places, so being able to connect them is very important. Being able to monitor these things on a 24-hours basis, getting a 60-second update if (something) goes down, and using Artificial Intelligence to identify if these things are working correctly. Bringing everything in, in one box, (while) spending less than they are right now.”
Interested in going deeper and learning more. The panelists and moderators provided more detail – with use cases, case studies, abstracts, and personal experience. For the full discussion, watch the session recording today!