LIGHTING THE WAY

Solution providers are finding new and innovative ways to sell emerging technologies to their customers 

by Heather Clancy || 3:00 PM EDT Fri. Sep. 16, 2005 

Can you cheat time?

It’s a question we’ve all pondered personally and professionally. Now, solution providers say it’s the underlying concept driving steadily growing sales of emerging technologies into the small-business market.

From notebooks, handheld devices and other mobile solutions to nascent VoIP installations and managed infrastructure and security services, VARs say small-business entrepreneurs are now more willing than ever to consider emerging technologies that promise to improve their ability to compete with their larger kin while simultaneously allowing them to regain some of their personal life.

In short, many small businesses are joining the ranks of early adopters, which is in turn promoting solution providers in the small-business market to the leading edge of the adoption curve.

But just because these customers are more open to emerging technologies doesn’t mean it’s an easy sell, solution providers say.

“It really has to fit their business and move them farther along in their goals as a business, or it has to be seen as a personal benefit that gives them back some more of their free time,” said Sarah Ducharme, CEO of New England Network Group, a small solution provider in Salem, Mass.

“People have now gone to enough seminars to understand that the one thing in life you can’t replace is time,” echoed Steve Harper, president of Network Management Group, Hutchison, Kan. “With all the financial pressure that other businesses place on small businesses or with corporate downsizing, you have to do more with less. People can’t always work harder, you have to work smarter. When something truly saves you time, people get more excited.”

Consider the evidence from CRN’s own exclusive Business Spending Survey. In July, the roughly 200 small-business executives in the study named VoIP and intranet development as two of their top priorities for the quarter.

Separate statistics from In-Stat/MDR suggest that approximately 20 percent of all businesses will have invested in a VoIP installation by the end of 2005. While adoption plans are more aggressive among larger companies, smaller businesses were more inclined to use a solution provider for their deployment, according to the research company.

When it comes to other emerging technologies, such as tablet computers, smaller health-care concerns are among those clearly leading the way in adoption, according to another In-Stat/MDR study. While sales have been slow to take off, the firm now predicts that sales of tablets will reach $5.4 billion by 2009.

“The gap—and needs—of the large enterprise client vs. the small business is closing,” said Tracy Butler, president of Acropolis Technology Group, a 20-person solution provider based in Wood River, Ill.

Ducharme, a channel pioneer in unified messaging systems back in 1999, said what makes solution providers all the more convincing in representing emerging technologies to the small-business market is that many are themselves small businesses.

Indeed, she said when it comes to sales techniques, seeing is believing. Not only is it important for solution providers to test an emerging technology before trying to represent it, small-business VARs must have demonstration equipment available for prospects to test. But a word of caution: Don’t overwhelm customer prospects with too much at once.

“Pick the feature set in the device that they will grasp really quickly, otherwise you could overwhelm them. Once they’ve gotten their arms around it, you can slowly show off more of the feature set,” Ducharme said.

Just as important, perhaps, is the need for a solution provider to thoroughly test whether they’ll be able to support a technology adequately if any hiccups occur before, during or after deployment. Ducharme shares a cautionary tale related to her days in unified messaging. Because the time-saving benefits were obvious and easy to sell, her business quickly found itself one of the largest resellers of the technology in the New England region. But when certain features failed to perform as promised by the vendor, New England Network Group found the product difficult to support. Subsequently, they made the decision to drop the product.

“There were pieces of the puzzle that weren’t complete or that didn’t work exactly as advertised. ... We paid the price because of it,” she said.

Ducharme said the importance of finding the right champion within an account also cannot be underestimated. Often, this could be the business owner, but it could just as easily be a new hire. For example, a salesperson used to having mobile technology at their disposal could prove an invaluable ally when they join a company with less IT-oriented sales techniques. And be open-minded about where the sales pitch takes place. Sometimes, entrepreneurs don’t want to admit they need outside help, so you may wind up visiting a small-business owner’s home office. “They don’t want people in the office to know they don’t know how to do something,” Ducharme said. “Working through change is a pretty sensitive thing.”