The fast and the prosperous

CRN hosted two roundtables with Fast50 companies and awards sponsors, where moderators Nate Cochrane and Brad Howarth guided discussions on disruptive selling techniques and how these resellers and MSPs turbo-charged their revenue growth

GUESTS
Darren Gore, Calibre One
Geoffrey Hughes, Venn IT
Jason McClure, Sliced Tech
Angela Moutinho, Solista
Michael Omeros, Over the Wire
Christopher Uchanski, Reseau
Alison Walker, Bluescale
Joseph Mesiti, Enosys Solutions
James Kahn, Idea 11
Nathan Belling, Insync Technology
Anthony Collings, Basis Networks
Sachin Verma, Oreta
Grahame Gilson, Cirrus Networks
Jo Masters, Tquila ANZ
Emily Grinton, Vibrato

SPONSORS
Geoff Wright, Dell EMC
Leo Lynch, StorageCraft
Muralee Kanagaratnam, APC by Schneider Electric
Nick Verykios, Arrow ECS
David Fenner, Ruckus Wireless
Rob Rae, Datto
Jason Duerden, Cylance

HOSTS
Nate Cochrane, CRN
Brad Howarth, CRN

Lead with a style that fits

Jason McClure, Sliced Tech
We deliver everything as a service and retain ownership of assets. We adopted the Microsoft solutions-selling approach because we do a lot of business with government and enterprise that have compliance requirements.
We’re an Australian company with many security certifications so we’re fortunate that government created the crisis for us.
They said: No more capex, it’s all opex. Solution selling is fine where this is already a crisis, but with disruptive selling you must generate trust through marketing, being a subject-matter expert or independent ‘ticks’.

Take notice

Geoff Wright, Dell EMC
I don’t like ‘disruptive selling’; I prefer ‘value selling’. So I say to you, “I noticed you’re doing a lot of work with Microsoft; this is why I can help”. We can create a crisis that is a positive opportunity by understanding a customer’s strategic vision.

Jason McClure
There was a government CTO or CIO who in his first three months had 87 vendor meetings. People knock on the door and unless the client trusts you, you won’t get your foot in the door. The big guys are all knocking on their door, and they take those meetings.

Personality counts

Alison Walker, Bluescale
I’ve had the big boys show up and ‘throw up’ [talk about themselves]. They didn’t know what was happening with their customer and tried to sell something I didn’t need. If you form a relationship with a person, chances of them disappearing out your life are minimal. People don’t buy off brands; they buy off people, and your frontline people are why they buy. 

Do right by your clients

Christopher Uchanski, Reseau
For us, it’s all about ethics and integrity. Vendors and our competitors are in there, and they’re a lot bigger than us, but our clients know we’ve always done the right thing by them, wholeheartedly, and that’s why they keep coming back, and they’ll be transparent with us.

Know your target businesses

Muralee Kanagaratnam, APC by Schneider Electric
Disruptive selling is like cloud computing; it’s not new. What we now see is the data you get, and how a salesperson uses it, has changed. You can walk in knowing so much more about your consumer.

Alison Walker
Buyers are so much more educated now and that’s great. I love having a conversation about what technology can do for your business, instead of educating them on the ABCs of computing.

Form a partner coalition

Darren Gore, Calibre One
We recently invested in wireless bridging company [Airbridge Networks] because we work with Indigenous organisations — and this is different to Sydney and Melbourne — and they need us to deliver fibre into a community of 5000–10,000 people but they may have 40 properties.
It’s cost- and maintenance-prohibitive to lay fibre. We were one of the first towns to get NBN [but] just finding a connection address that matches what NBN says vs what Google says vs Telstra vs Australia Post is a challenge — especially when a building has 90 tenancies and they’re numbered incorrectly.

Vendors fill capability gaps with vendors, too

Leo Lynch, Storagecraft
We have enterprise customers but most are mid-market and SMBs, where IT is not at the forefront, it’s outsourced to a partner. And so Wannacry was our call to action.
We polled partners, and 60–80 percent have customers who paid after being hit. And so we teamed with security vendors such as Trend Micro to present to customers. Because people see Cryptolocker as a security issue, and it is, but 80 percent of lost data is from individuals in your organisation. It’s from software and hardware failures.
We educate customers, not on technology, but how to solve a business problem they didn’t know they had until a crisis came.

Leverage multiple relationships

Michael Omeros, Over the Wire
National Storage, and Relationships Australia Queensland needed call centre solutions so we worked with partner Comlynx, and we did voice and network. We also have many retailer clients who need a low-cost router and 4G backup – but not over the internet; we want private IP for seamless failover. We went to Optus and did R&D with them and Huawei to write firmware so we can deploy a Huawei or Billion router to a site and, if NBN fails, it switches over [to the other service]. We deployed it with Cue clothing’s 150 stores, RCG Group (Hype and Athlete’s Foot) and we do half of Foodworks’ stores.

Identify important assets

Michael Omeros
Our thought processes and credibility are probably our most important assets. There was an R&D grant [for the 4G backup service] and it’s added IP but from a valuation perspective we haven’t added to goodwill. But it definitely adds a lot of goodwill in terms of your ability to deliver solutions to customers, so it’s an implied value as opposed to software put on to the balance sheet.

Culture breeds creativity

Geoffrey Hughes, Venn IT
The joke at our organisation is customers will tolerate me so they can have the best resources and outcomes. So my job is to create the right culture and place where people want to work so it attracts talent.

Understand limits

Jason McClure
The biggest IP discussions are with my own staff: Here’s what we share with our partner and customer, and here’s what we won’t share. I add a margin, so if a customer can cut out that cost, we have to assume they will. But we have to share enough to be trusted and be seen to add value, so it’s fine a balancing line. In a partnership or joint venture, apportioning in an upfront contract the value each party brings (or owes) is challenging so you do a ‘true-up’ after the fact.

Inspire the next great leaders

Geoffrey Hughes
One of our employees read a case study we posted and he thought it was innovative: “They’re not doing things the same way, and that’s what I see myself doing.” When we hire people, we’re not looking for certain skills – they can be taught.
We look for attitude and cultural fit. We’re soon moving premises, and I spent time in the fit-out talking to designers, so when somebody walks in they get a feeling for our ‘vibe’ – they’ll see people collaborating – and it will attract talent. So if we can get people to our premises, we’re halfway there.

Enable new champions

Darren Gore
One of our major shareholders is a $250 million revenue company that’s been around for about 10 years. It grew as a group of companies, each a subsidiary office led by a ‘champion’ – a leader with great networks, capability, capacity and passion. And it enabled champions to have equity or ownership, but still keep the core of the group as one.
Gerry Harvey has a similar principle. We adopted it a year-and-a-half ago and it’s really interesting to see, as we move into Cairns and Townsville, it gives a new tool to start conversations with the right people – those who want to take on risk but be rewarded while having more control and still be part of something that’s larger.

Diversify your thinking

Angela Moutinho, Solista
Political correctness is quite dangerous. We women have enough problems; we don’t need to be hired just because we are female. I recently learned the fun fact that, in IT, only 14 percent of executives are female. A scary, small number when research also showed that if you have female executives, your company will be 35 percent more profitable.
Whether it’s women or cultures, diversity is about educating everyone that bringing different perspectives into your business makes you more successful.
I think [diversity] policies are dangerous. It’s more about getting that understanding into your people that you must look broadly to be successful.

Understand leadership

Nick Verykios, Arrow ECS ANZ
Leadership is being able to take one person, or a whole group of people, somewhere where they wouldn’t have otherwise have gone by themselves. And the issue always is, is it ethical or not? More needs to be spent on an ethical outcome, rather than the actual taking someone where they wouldn’t have otherwise have gone.

Understand leadership

James Kahn, Idea 11
There are a few types of leadership. There’s the classic form of leadership where you look at the largest integrators or largest companies in the country. But we see ourselves as a leader in what we do in the AWS space, and we’re proposing solutions and doing things that other people are not really doing here.

Understand leadership

Joseph Mesiti, Enosys Solutions
There’s technical leadership, but there’s also people leadership. It’s fundamental to the culture of the organisation, and you need to be conveying that down.

Play to your strengths

Emily Grinton, Vibrato
I like to think of myself as the support crew for my team. There’s no way I’m going to teach them anything on a technical level, so leadership is empowering everyone to do what they need to do to get the job done.

Think outside the square

David Fenner, Ruckus
It’s taking solutions to places where they’ve not always gone. If somebody’s actually demonstrating some thought leadership or technology leadership in integration, it allows them to make their worth in the market, rather than fighting over what’s left.

If we as vendors are not driving technology and trying to find a home for it, then maybe we are the culprits? But there has to be a need underneath, whether it’s recognised or unrecognised. So we have to convince people to buy and we have to demonstrate what our worth is to the end user through the channel.

Tell it like it is

Jo Masters, Tquila ANZ
We are a professional services company. We get in at the executive level, and help them and deliver the hard messages, very fast.
I don’t think you’re a true partner if you don’t go in and deliver the hard messages. I’ve seen too many people who compete with us that won’t tell the customer they’re going to fail, but it’s what you need to do to stay relevant. I want to be here for the long haul, not just for a project. We guide them and say, Okay, this is what you can be doing to stay relevant. We do the whole enterprise roadmap, and give them a vision.

Find the right path forward

James Kahn
The iPhone came out and everyone thought it was cool, but no-one knew it was going to take over the world. So it’s really hard to pick what is going to be the next big thing, and how big that’s going to be. What helps is to not think about what it would mean for your business, but think about what it means for the customer’s business.

Sachin Verma, Oreta
We choose our vendors based on their vision, not for that product, but for three or four years down the track. That vision keeps us in front of the curve with our competition, and ahead of our customers, to make sure that we make the right decision. And that’s why in talking to their leadership, understanding their vision is quite important.

Foster long-term respect and loyalty

Anthony Collings, Basis Networks
It all comes down to organisational structure and behaviour. How a sales manager behaves is a result of what pressures they’ve got above them. Do they care about my business on the last day of the quarter the same way they’re doing the first of the quarter? So, it’s that consistency of behaviour that’s going to drive a relationship.

Take the time to get it right

Grahame Gilson, Cirrus Networks
When we set the business up we didn’t want to be another ‘me too’ player where it was a race to the bottom of the barrel. So we spent time looking, and we onboarded some relevant next-generation technologies where we could go out and disrupt the market a little bit, bloody some noses. And we were pretty successful and we won business on that basis.
Now, four years into it, some of those vendors that were relatively new to the marketplace are growing at such a rate of knots their sales targets are increasing, and the behaviour from the salespeople changes. And all of a sudden the loyalty that we had when we were instrumentally helping them grow their business changes dramatically because they’ve got targets this big to hit.

Stand out from the crowd

Jason Duerden, Cylance
We’re very selective on who we work with, from a partner perspective, on what markets they service, what specialisation they have, what skills they have. We do that assessment just like every vendor would do. We’re not going to just sign up one-deal partners.

Understand the business value

Nick Verykios
A partner has to work out how they’re going to solve the customer’s business problem. And part of their business problem is an economic problem, not a technology problem.
Suddenly you’re actually doing something for your customer that has got nothing to do with your vendor or your distributor or anyone but you and your brand and your ability to apply leadership, and that leadership is taking them somewhere where not only you’re reducing their cost but increasing their revenue.

Work with people

Emily Grinton
I think it has to do with how you work with your customers. You need to know what problems you’re trying to solve. I hate a hack day where there’s a bunch of technology put out, and we say, ’Let’s play with it’. What problem are you trying to solve?

Listen up

Sachin Verma
Listen to your customers. Go there. Don’t live behind an office wall. Understand what’s happening on the ground from a customer point of view. And then go to your Silicon Valleys and so on and understand what’s happening, and try to marry that up together. You can only do that by conversations, by understanding technology, and by understanding the business problems.

Take the time to pick winners

Jo Masters
We have hired some very, very smart people. We also make sure that we do a lot of research in the industry before we go in. We are creating IP around certain industries, such as aged care, to make a difference and actually be a thought leader. You have to make your customer look good, too. We like to do a ‘seed and grow’ approach. We do something very small to show that we can add value. Then, once they can see a return, they’ll trust us to move forward. We can move onto the next piece and the next piece.

Add options

Sachin Verma
We run an organisation both in Mode 1 and Mode 2. In Mode 2 we are evaluating and doing a quick, ‘fail fast’ IT approach. So whatever is coming through, we do a filter run before we actually take it to our customer. If there are three different options with three different vendors coming through, we filter that so that we know that this is as good as what they claim it to be.

Offer leading edge over bleeding edge

James Kahn
There are always tonnes of new, cool things that come out. You’ve got to judge the intersection of what people are really buying. If your customers aren’t ready for whatever new technology’s been announced, and you can’t implement it for them, it’s dead in the water.

Don't fear new ideas

Rob Rae, Datto
The average age of our employee base is about 28, so we’ve got a very young company. It’s kind of exciting when you can bring in a millennial who’s maybe never worked anywhere before, but has got great ideas, new approaches, and challenges the way that we’ve traditionally done business. I think that’s what the channel needs.

Embrace the unknown

Joseph Mesiti
A couple of disruptive technologies helped us found the business. They’ve changed now dramatically, so how do you pivot, how do you constantly stay relevant to those or discover the new disruptive industry? I like to think that we’re still small and agile enough to foresee the need and react to it. We are a niche player, with 35 people. We just do security, so we know a lot about security and hopefully we can see where it’s going.

Invest in the future, but balance investments

James Kahn
We transitioned our business from an IT infrastructure consultancy to an AWS consultancy. We had to do tonnes of training and we had to find early-stage opportunities. It was definitely a balancing act between investing and training and selling it — trying to not sell things that were too advanced for us until we were ready for it.

Stay relevant

Nathan Belling, Insync Technology
I definitely don’t agree with training for training’s sake. But as a partner, how do you deliver to your customer? How do you have expertise in a specific product, vendor or market, without the training and certification? If a partner is not committed to do something, are they going to be committed to the product?

Stay relevant

Jason Duerden
Once you say, ‘Yes, we want to play’, then how are we going to make you successful? Because the time from signing to first deal might be six months, or might be 12 months.
How do we stay relevant throughout that time? How do we bring it forward? What sort of activities are we doing to change your business from a skills perspective or from an offerings perspective? That is our job.