Cracking a new market can be tricky.
You need a brilliant product, a compelling sales pitch, and a super-supportive wholesale partner with your best interests at heart.
In the telecoms channel reseller space, differentiation can be a significant challenge.
Products and solutions are constantly evolving, key customer messaging must keep pace in order to stay relevant, and providers are often preoccupied with revenue rather than relationships.
Against that backdrop, it’s easy to see why in 2023 – with economic and geo-political crises likely to endure – resellers need to partner only with those providers for whom mutuality is most important.
Providers whose solutions are smart, reliable and margin-rich, and which respond directly to the sophisticated demands of today’s enterprise customers.
Providers that feel more like an extension of resellers’ own businesses rather than simply a supplier.
In short, providers that understand that their success is wholly dependent on the success of others.
“For too many providers and their resellers it used to be all about cost, but success in today’s enterprise environment is so much more nuanced than that – to capitalise, both parties must be equally invested,” says Aurelie Pearson, Marketing Director (France) at leading European UCaaS provider Dstny, which is putting the power of partnership at the heart of its 2023 strategy.
“Of course it must begin with a brilliant product, but then it is about adding value to the reseller relationship by providing the crucial training and support they need to take that product to market.
“Finally, it is also about an ongoing culture of closeness and inter-dependence on each other. Mutuality – that notion of each party only achieving success when the other does – is absolutely key.”
In Dstny’s case, it has transferred all of that smart thinking into practical delivery, via a partnership support programme that a growing number of reseller businesses are already benefitting from.
It places the emphasis on the end user experience that is derived from its clever and ultra-reliable cloud-powered ‘all-in-one-place’ omnichannel communications platform; and empowers resellers via a game-changing (and free) training and education initiative.
“Our resellers are helped to talk to their customers about a solution rather than a product,” says Pearson.
“We train them to talk to organisations about the issues they face, such as productivity, remote working and how to use data analytics to improve their workflows.
“We help them talk about value rather than price because price does not necessarily cut through in the way it used to. We give them a new sales pitch that supports customers’ understanding of the transformative nature of our solution and how, together, we can help them digitize and thrive.
“Importantly, we do all of that face-to-face with our resellers by getting out there and meeting them and their teams in person. We deliver a day-long session in which we explain market trends in detail and how they should talking about them to their customers. We then deliver the technical training they need to demonstrate to their customers just how transformational our platform can be.
The sessions – so far staged at a range of prestige venues in France – focus on today’s two modern enterprise communication priorities: a mobile first approach, and Microsoft Teams integration.
“In certain countries, the mobile first and remote working approaches are still very new concepts,” says Pearson.
“To date, enterprises in those countries have been concerned with the technical functionality of cloud communication products, not the wider benefits they bring.
“As a result of our close engagement with them, our resellers are able to have those conversations. They can show how they can integrate their customers’ telephony with Microsoft Teams and, importantly, how that will deliver long-term added value for customers and employees.
“They can talk confidently about remote worker productivity, security and effective virtual collaboration. Those are the things that organisations are interested in and those are the things that the most successful resellers will be able to articulate.”
In addition to that training and education, Dstny also supports its resellers in pre-sales meetings and presentations, and it provides access to a content-rich e-learning platform.
“We join our resellers on their first call with a prospective customer so, if they struggle to answer a question or demonstrate a benefit, we can help,” says Pearson.
“Organisations are understandably nervous when they move to a new solution, but they gain comfort from knowing we are so closely aligned with their service provider.”
It seems possible that 2023 could be a year of opportunity for resellers who pick a progressive provider partner.
Are YOU ready to take advantage?
For details of Dstny’s upcoming reseller partner events in France, click here.
