 Cover Story
Selling Deep
Deep selling to your existing accounts may be the best way to enliven your business during the current economic slowdown
By K R Nambiar
In the recent CRN channel confidence survey, as many as 81 percent of the respondents considered deep selling to their existing accounts to be one of their biggest priorities for the year. Many in the industry perceive this as the Indian solutions provider’s planned move from a vendor-centric model to a customer-centric one. Surprisingly, vendors are also supportive and are gearing up to meet the new demands of the Indian solutions provider (SP).
Signs of the times
To a large extent, the thought process behind giving importance to deep selling and moving closer to the customer has a lot to do with the slowdown in the economy. “The slowdown has certainly opened up everyone’s eyes. Prior to this, most partners were eager to just acquire new businesses and grow faster,” explains Ajaya Maitin, CEO, Graphic Trades, Patna. “However, the recession has made us explore more opportunities within our own existing customers. It has certainly been a learning experience.”
The change is quite evident to many industry observers who feel that during the boom times an average systems integrator was so busy that he was just taking select orders and fulfiling them. “The recession has definitely transformed them to be more proactive and aggressive, and to explore new opportunities within their customer base,” observes Nagendra DS, GM, LAN, Nexans, Singapore.
Having more face-to-face meetings with existing customers is a strategy that most solutions partners have been deploying over the past few months to increase their sales coverage. Some have confirmed that it has paid rich dividends. “Since the first signs of a slowdown we’ve been insisting that our sales force spend more time in the market meeting customers, understanding their requirements, and ensuring that few opportunities are missed. This has certainly ensured that targets are met,” says TG Ramesh, Director, Precision Technologies, Chennai.
Assessing needs
Bengaluru-based Connoisseur Electronics says that deep selling to its existing customer base has helped the company survive for more than a decade. “If you analyze our balance sheet, close to 70 percent of our revenues year-on-year have been from repeat business,” says Harish Kumar RP, Director, Connoisseur.
One of Connoisseur’s deep selling strategies involves in-depth technology update sessions that it conducts regularly for the IT managers of its client companies. “The CIOs or CTOs are sometimes so pre-occupied with their own challenges that they rarely have any time to update their own knowledge base. Every quarter we meet our customers, sometimes with a technical expert from Intel or another principal, and provide them with a thorough 360° view of the state of technology. These sessions often result in customers coming up with opportunities triggering new purchases,” adds Kumar.
Whenever Connoisseur introduces a new product, the systems builder also arranges free demo products (meant for testing) for key customers. “We have a thorough understanding of our customers’ requirements, and provide proof of concept (POC) for what they need. Sometimes we give a free hand to customers to test and evaluate the product for months, and almost always end up billing these products,” says Kumar. During most of the last quarter, this Rs 21 crore company had made nearly Rs 1 crore worth of products available for evaluation to its customers.
Providing free services is yet another strategy to ensure consistent sales cycles with customers. “We do a number of free audits for the customers, and present them with equations for saving costs depending on the product upgrades and new solutions. A simple example was a power audit we did whereby we proved to a customer that replacing 200 CRT monitors with 200 LCD monitors would actually end up in savings in two years. They placed an order immediately,” adds Kumar.
L Ashok, MD, Future Business Tech, Chennai, cites an example of how the company builds POCs for their open source solutions. “Our biggest successes have been in solving pain-points of customers when it really matters, and we have done that through active demonstration of the technology in hand. We managed to grab 80 percent of the IT budgets of a leading Chennai-based corporate house because we tailored a service to figure out the intrusion detection in their mailing systems which resulted in bringing to light a case of corporate espionage,” Ashok informs. “There were other service providers, but we were working closer with the customers to recognize opportunities and this helped us get ahead.”
Rajeev Mehta, MD, Zest Systems, ran a campaign among his customer base offering attractive buyback schemes throughout last year. “It was more of a strategy to break the ice during a period when budgets were frozen. The aggressive campaign helped and we got the attention of customers. They started talking to us for complementary products,” Mehta says.
The know-how
Deep selling requires tremendous patience and the game plan needs a lot of focused attention. “We start off with our structured cabling services with most of our customers. Then we look at getting the switching business and the routing business. These days we have graduated to offering other services such as security, data center solutions, storage and several other value-added services,” says AL Srinath, CEO, Shell Networks, Hyderabad. “Each step is gradual, and with every step the customer gains more confidence in you.”
Bengaluru-based ValuePoint has set an agenda to increase its wallet share within existing customers. They have added new services and product lines to tap their customers. “We have been constantly working with our customers, have done methodical customer mapping, and understand the customer needs with visibility for years ahead in some cases. This is also helping us to better plan our product, services and vendor alignments,” says RS Shanbhag, MD, ValuePoint Group.
ValuePoint has also diversified beyond IT and is offering a host of services including knowledge process outsourcing. It is also thinking of offering a number of other services from realty consulting to manpower consulting by leveraging on the relationships they have developed for their core business.
Playing favorites?
Since attempts to deep sell is considered to be the first step in a company’s transformation from a vendor-centric business to a customer-centric business, partners feel that the business itself is a challenge. “When you try adapting your organization to be solution-centric and customer-centric, you also have to balance your relations with your vendors. As you look at increasing your wallet share, you may also need to think beyond your current vendor relationships. This is a challenge for many organizations,” says Arun Kumar Gupta of Darts IT Networks, New Delhi.
However, others feel that a partner can deep sell within his accounts without actually upsetting vendor alignments. “For us our main principal is HP, and so we align with HP’s product lines. Wherever the customer needs a solution or product that HP does not have we push a complementary brand or product,” says Mehta of Zest.
“Deep selling does not necessarily mean that you try to grab every bit of the customer’s wallet. In our case we have gradually moved up the value chain into services such as networking and storage, but have stayed away from supplying laptops or servers, or any non-value businesses,” says Srinath.
Groundwork
While most partners would like to grab a bigger share of their customers’ IT spends, there are several challenges. The biggest is a customer’s confidence in the channel partner’s capabilities when the partner pitches for new business opportunities.
“While relationships do matter, most IT heads and CIOs identify certain vendors with the different services and solutions they require. A channel partner might be supplying systems and servers, but the CIO would have already developed a comfort zone with other vendors for security or facilities management. Despite a strong relationship, it’s sometimes difficult to break such comfort zones when a partner tries to grow up the value chain and starts addressing more opportunities” says S Sriram, CEO, iValue Infosolutions, Bengaluru.
However, Sriram says that most CIOs would prefer dealing with fewer service providers, and all a partner needs is a strong relationship to start pitching in.
“Whenever you start a new service it’s important that you do some pilot projects with trusted customers, and once you have a proven case you can take the service to other customers,” advises Shanbhag.
Since deep selling requires deep understanding of the customer, many advocate implementation of robust CRM solutions. “A well-crafted CRM solution can definitely work wonders to your sales potential because you are able to analyze and interpret data that can point to fresh sales opportunities,” says Sunil Jose, MD, Sybase India.
Naveen Kapur, CEO, Iris Unified Technology, attributes his success over the last couple of years to the implementation of the Navision CRM solution. “Earlier, many of our sales staff used to be unaware of some critical customer details. However, the CRM implementation helped us to have the necessary information to tailor-make proposals for customers. This helped us in some major wins almost immediately.”
Vipul Thakkar, CEO, Silvertouch Technologies, Ahmedabad, also attributes a part of the company’s success to its CRM solution. “The CRM solution we implemented helped us realize new opportunities which resulted in a multi-fold increase in the number of proposals to our customer base and helped us deep sell into our existing accounts.”
While the corporate resellers and SPs have reaped rich dividends through CRM solutions, even running simple EDM campaigns are said to have helped smaller resellers and even retailers. “We advise our retailers to invest in simple CRM solutions, track existing customers, and keep them up-to-date with the latest offers and complementary products,” says S Rajendran, CMO, Acer India.
Selling up
Most of the vendors are recognizing these trends and are helping their partners to deep sell with their own strategies to sell through partner programs. “Sometimes there’s just a thin line between deep selling and up selling. It’s our constant endeavor to help partners grow their business and this might even end in up selling solutions,” says Anoop Nambiar, Director, Channels and Alliances, IBM India.
Nambiar says that their partners constantly seek IBM’s advice to help them increase business from their existing accounts. One of the key initiatives from IBM’s side has been to invest in a dedicated team to address partner concerns and consult on their behalf to increase their wallet share. “We have around five professionals in the team, one per zone. Each works closely with partners to look at growing their business and help them deep sell and figure out where we can push IBM products and solutions to their customers. So if a partner is already a server supplier, we’ll help the partner grab additional revenues in storage, software and services,” adds Nambiar.
Product bundling is one of the most common methods used by vendors to ensure that partners are able to grab more of the customers’ spend. “Apart from incentivizing partners to sell backup along with storage, we are offering pre-sales training to ensure that they are able to up sell solutions,” says Viswanath Ramaswamy, Director, Channels & Strategic Alliances, EMC India.
Some vendors such as Cisco have also customized their partner programs (such as The Cisco Industry Solutions Partner Network) to provide a number of perks for partners and help them sell networking solutions. “By building a repeatable solutions practice around pre-qualified applications, the channel partners not only increase their Cisco Solution Incentive Program discounts but can also add more value-added services to their customer base. They can take advantage of training, access to industry expertise, proposal-based joint marketing funds, turnkey demand-generation resources and facilitated joint business planning workshops,” says Paramjit Puri, Head, Strategic Alliances and SI Channel Business, Cisco India & Saarc.
Vendors are also trying to collect more data on their installed base and the accounts handled by partners
for the opportunity to up sell more of their solutions. “At present we have a decent understanding and can predict the requirements of the top 500 accounts handled by our partners. We can prepare them for opportunities in deep selling,” says Nambiar.
Final words
Nambiar adds that partners need to strike the right alliances and customize solutions along with ISVs and other vendors to deep sell to existing accounts. “To deep sell to your customers you need solutions. That is why we are stressing so much on our ISV alliance programs and are asking our hardware partners to go to market with ISVs.”
Repeating the age-old saying, ‘Customer is king,’ Swapnil Dutta, Director, Sun Microsystems adds, “Our focused partner programs ensure that ISVs team up with resellers/systems integrators to expand their sales coverage within customer accounts with enhanced and differentiated value propositions. Such a successful go-to-market strategy delivers a compelling proposition to the end-user.”
So while the merits of wide selling are not up for debate, what is clear is that deep selling (and additionally up selling) is critical to survive in the current times. The Indian SP now needs to be true to his name—and provide solutions.
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