When deciding to add voice and data solutions to your portfolio, you may read a lot of websites highlighting the benefits of key product offerings and explaining the potential benefits of partnering.
Most of the benefits suggested by suppliers as reasons to partner with them have turned into ‘givens’ overtime i.e. suppliers that don’t have them, won’t generally make your shortlist. Givens include quality of products, portals, 24/7 support, predictable and accurate commission payments and trust.
Outside of these, resellers and dealers need to know three things;
1 - Is it easy to sell, quote and order?
For a product to be easy to sell, it requires demand, unique features, reliability and a good price. If it is a great product with an over-complicated or clunky quoting and ordering portal, you will be less likely to recommend the services and place orders. If the supplier also makes your own selling process easier with collateral, contracts, proposals, sales support and advice, this may give you and your sales teams more confidence with their products.
Quoting systems need to be simple, easy to log into, with the ability to save customer details to avoid retyping. Quotes need to be fast, well laid out, detailed and clear.
Ordering systems need to be efficient with the ability to convert quotes to orders in one system. There needs to be an easy way to store and edit orders, should customer requirements change and detailed order updates.
2 - Can I win the business at a decent margin?
The price of the product is less important than your ability to win the deal against competition without having to discount. Of course this depends to a certain extent on the buy price but also on how obviously differentiated the offering is and how easy it is to justify costs to your customer. If the products are packaged up to suit the customer and are easy to demonstrate, this helps your customers understand their true value.
3 - Does it create support issues?
If your new products and services are creating support headaches you are likely to harm existing customer relationships and potentially harm the core business. It is important to understand how reliable the new services are and what the support or communications process is, should issues arise. It is nice to see 100% uptime guarantees and failover solutions. Should the worst happen it is useful to know how suppliers communicate with their partners, most of whom need answers quickly, as they have their own customers to answer to.
The Jola team have been supporting channel partners for years. Why not ask us your questions and see how we fare.
