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The CHORUSpondent Archives:
July 14, 2011
It’s Shiny, New and Better than Ever
You may have noticed that the CHORUSpondent has been conspicuously missing from your inbox over that past few months. Well, we are back and better than ever; Chorus has been strategizing about how we may relaunch our newsletter in a way that respects your valuable time, but also manages to keep IT decision-makers like yourself in the loop with the most important and salient tidbits of the month. Whether it be new products and services that can help your IT organization add even more value to the rest of the organization, trends in technology or helpful tips to for you to more effectively or efficiently manage your network. You can of course count on Chorus news, events and promotions as well.
To that end, what you can expect to see will be highly relevant, timely and topical news, highlights and editorial content delivered regularly each month. You may even notice a new "voice" or "tone" of the newsletter, which is intended to be more approachable and most importantly, collaborative with you.
Guess what? You can be part of the process! Please take just a moment to CLICK HERE to fill out a survey to give us some feedback on the type of content and editorial you would like to hear from us every month.
We hope you enjoy look forward very much to your honest feedback.
Top Chorus Technology Partner Expands their Reach
 Does your company have locations in Northern New Jersey, Harrisburg or Lancaster, PA? Then we have exciting news that could prove to be a game changer to you. One of Chorus' premiere technology partners, Line Systems Inc., has expanded their network coverage to these new areas in Northern NJ and the far Western suburbs of Philadelphia. Line Systems (LSI) is one of Chorus' oldest and closest business partners and considers themselves "enablers" of today' core IP technologies like VoIP and MPLS services, as well as some of the next generation technologies that will be tomorrow's mission critical applications.
These areas are now open for business so contact your Chorus agent today to learn what Line Systems Inc. can do for you; or contact Chorus directly for a free network and technology assessment to see if Lines System is a fit for your business.
Click here to get the process started.
Small Business Corner:
Dynamic Technology = Changes in How You Should Be Selling
 The word "selling" can have quite the negative connotation. I recently purchased a vehicle and I can certainly recall a conversation I had with a sales rep and then walking away thinking to myself how hard he was trying to "sell me." Though this is certainly subjective, in my mind the word "Selling" solicits a visceral, negative response from most people. It is usually an invasive experience that it is unwanted, unsolicited and unappreciated.
Small business owners, can likely relate to that; both as victims of an over-zealous yet unskilled sales rep or as the perpetrators.
Techniques like Consultative Selling switched the paradigm from a very product/feature related sales model to what is now more needs based and customer-centric. That next evolutions took us to what was still a very intrinsic focused approach, looking for areas of interest for the customer and whether they would be classified as “needs” or “wants” / “nice-to-haves”; and of course hoping to position more “Needs” than “Wants” and making a buyers truly feel the potential repercussions (psychological, professional, etc) of not addressing those needs. Sales Reps would learn to identify customers that were leaning toward the “need” column as those are most likely to buy.
Another popular sales methodology called Solution Selling which, at the time, I thought was certainly the best, continued to build on that shift of paradigm and is described by wikipedia as "Rather than just promoting an existing product, the salesperson focuses on the customer's pain(s) and addresses the issue with his or her offerings (product and services)." The resolution of the pain is what constitutes a true "solution", and ultimately what drives the sale. The big story here is the shift to looking more holistically at a particular point of pain and also a little more holistically at the vendors product and service portfolio to put together a custom solution to meet that customers’ need. Even multi-vendor solutions could be require Certainly, this was an evolution.
I suspect the innovation of these evolutions was the shift to a customer-centric view-point and associated tactics rather than a product and feature focus. To me this seems a marked, and positive change in the buyer/sales rep paradigm, greatly in favor of, what ultimately becomes, a real partnership between buyer and sales rep, vendor and customer.
Recently I was exposed to an updated approach, which continues to build on the foundation started years ago however this time they challenge some basic tactical approaches to past methodologies. The folks at www.siriusdecisions.com say their research indicates that increasingly buyers do their own research and invite sales people in later in the process. Their research also indicates that sales organizations are slower to adopt this change than their customers and are considerably less dynamic.
More recently, a new possible breakthrough is from Corporate Visions, who are rewriting the afore mentioned tactical approach by introducing the concept of a “Wedge Story” which is similar to differentiating your company or your solution from any other vendors’ solution (incumbent or not) but the essence of the difference here is that this part of your process should be about establishing the answer to the question, “if all things are equal, why would you, the prospect, buy at all, instead of defer a decision on new technology acquisitions.
It seems that; it is of equal to greater importance to establish that the status quo is unacceptable and that the price of inaction is greater than the price of the wrong action. Apparently recent events in the economy have left a sales reps biggest competition as not their closest competitor or incumbent vendor, but rather a decision maker deciding that they don't need to make a change that badly. Nobody has compelled them to act. The time to introduce this wedge story (according to Corporate Visions) is somewhere early in, or before, the probing process, as they feel that customers today are expecting their sales rep to anticipate the types of challenges they are facing in today's world as a customer and that they should be an expert in “Solutioning” or helping them develop a response to those challenges that holistically address the problem. What they do not want to continue dealing with is two, three, four different vendors coming in on a first meeting and spending the prospect customers’ valuable time asking the same deep, penetrating questions over and over again. What they prefer is to hear a different approach, like the ones we have just discussed.
Interestingly, this also seems to back up what I mentioned above from that company Sirius Decisions, which is to say that customers are doing their own research rather than, as it was in the past, getting their primary education form reps; They are, in fact, inviting sales reps into the process later; possibly because, as Corporate Visions claims, it is because few sales reps establish themselves as experts early on, create that "Wedge Story" and them present their companies differentiators. Then and only then should the sales reps start delving into the uniqueness of the prospects otherwise average and mundane challenges. Either way, we an all agree that we all lose the later we enter the purchase process.
So the story here is that, if your sales staff are still selling based on Zig Ziglar, or Solution Selling or Consultative selling, you may have a great foundation but don’t be the last in your industry to recognize the change in purchasing habits of all kinds of industries. As Dan Reinbold, President of our technology partner PAETEC, who actually designed their sales training for which he has won multiple awards and they are currently in the top 50 training programs Worldwide for three years, says; "All you can do is work to increase your odds of making a sale."
Well in order to help you, our customers, increase your odds of making sales, next month the CHORUSpondent will feature an article that will give you quick, concise and actionable tips to help you “increase your odds of making the sale”, including ways that technology, available through Chorus today, can help you support your sales force. In the meant time, we open this new feature on “Life as a Small Business” was helpful, if not unexpected from your technology carrier. The way we see it, this is a partnership. Your success is our success as we remain committed to providing you the best solutions and support in the industry.
Are Your Peers Taking the Cloud Seriously?
 Ever wonder, as you are navigating today's labyrinth of next generation technologies, if you are making the right decisions and investments in the right technology? With such a crowded space of technology and vendors? Or have you taken a “wait and see” attitude and if so, is that the right decision. Based on some recent market research shared by some of our current technology partners, mostly via Gartner Group and their Keynote Presentation at the Channel Partners Trade show, Chorus is able to share with you a little perspective on what your peers are doing when it comes to adopting today's most popular next generation technology: Cloud Computing.
Comparing the top 10 top strategic areas for IT growth and investment for 2010 compared to 2012 appears to show one major trend; there has been a shift from holding OpEx spending steady and making major CapEx cuts to investment in applications and technologies that enable the growth and productivity of the rest of the organization
The top 4 technologies in terms of carrier / vendor revenue growth and adoption:
- Cloud Computing
- Mobility Solutions
- Unified Communications
- UC growth seems poised to contract however it seems it is because certain key pieces of UC like the following are so close to seeing an explosion of adoption themselves, Collaboration, Video/Telepresence and therefore, we at Chorus still see UC as a high demand for 2011 through 2012)
- Security
In 2011:
- 66% of SMB's will pursue Cloud Solutions in 2011
- 35% will actually implement in 2011
In 2015:
- 90% of Enterprises and government in the US will implement some sort of cloud solution
What are CIO's top priorities?
- Create Value to the rest of the organization through productivity enhancement, enabling collaboration, etc or more old fashioned functions like cost savings and optimizing bandwidth
- Manage security risk, particularly in terms or compliance issues and avoiding breach of customers trust; which we have seen can be disastrous lately. A decentralization and democratization of IT is driving security measures (e.g., employees buy their own iPhone and IT has no control over what is on these devices, how do they keep threats on those phones off the network?
- CIO's are now more than ever looking beyond the borders of their own organizations and are not only focused on enablement and growth of other areas of the business but are now being judged on the ability to successfully
It is a “brave new world” in IT and if you are not a Fortune 1000 company, you may not have the luxury of anticipating, responding to and mitigating opportunities to make substantive, beneficial changes to your organization, let alone even react to the immediate security threats that didn't exist just a couple years ago but that are now prevalent.
That is, of course, where Chorus an help you. Whether is it is analyzing your current network infrastructure to optimize, helping you aligning your companies business goals with the tools that can enable them, or performing a security threat analysis and plugging the gaps, Chorus is the one vendor that can bring to bear over 50 years of telecom intellectual capitol and best-of-breed technology partners.
Click here for more information.
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