Sales secrets of top Australian Windows device resellers

Form and function

CRN gathered some of Microsoft's top device reseller partners for a roundtable lunch to discuss the cutting-edge functionality of Windows Pro devices. We wanted to understand what was motivating customers to upgrade their device fleets, and whether new features and functionality could drive sales outside of traditional refresh cycles.

Over lunch at top Sydney restaurant Aria, guests revealed how devices are central to their customers' workplace transformation efforts – moving to more flexible teams, looking at activity-based working and replacing cumbersome, pen-to-paper approaches.

Resellers told us that productivity improvements, increased employee satisfaction and the ability to simplify logins and reduce support calls have all helped them win device sales. The sales are not only coming from the traditional buyers in IT departments, but from new lines of business right across customer organisations, especially HR.

GUESTS

• Vicky Bizos, business development manager, Staples Australia
• Peter Garner, multinational OEM partner manager , Microsoft
• Victoria Gertner, business development manager, Datacom Systems
• Michael Giusti, managing director, Harbour IT
• Daniel Goffredo, OEM Windows & devices sales lead, Microsoft
• David Gulli, CTO, Thomas Duryea Logicalis
• John Hanna, managing director, Southern Cross Computer Systems
• Steven Kiernan, editorial director, CRN
• Jason King, national sales director, ASI Solutions
• Martin Kosasih, director, Virtunet
• James Mercer, solution director, Fujitsu Australia Limited
• Luke Sheridan, NSW manager, CDM Communications
• Stephen Watson, senior relationship manager, AC3

Training needs to move beyond feeds and speeds

Jason King, ASI Solutions: One of the things I struggle with when I get training for my team – and I’ve got close to 30 guys now in our sales team across the board – is the vendors still want to talk speeds and feeds, and the vendor wants to talk about their device.

Look at the car industry. If we’re going to buy a car, most of us know all the speeds and feeds before we walk into that dealership. We know what we want, we know what that car’s going to do, we’ve done the research. Our customers know the products. They know what they want. They’ve already looked at the speeds and feeds.

The training needs to be around how a solution fits certain business types, or business verticals. That’s the hardest thing to get from a vendor when they train my team – to stay away from speeds and feeds. I cringe when I watch my staff's eyes glaze, when they look at their mobile phone. Vendors have got to tell the story around how that solution will benefit the customer.

I expect my staff to learn that individual speeds and feeds themselves out of research, on the web.

Luke Sheridan, CDM: I double up all our training. I’ve got a sales trainer that I use. He sits across all the states in our business. Over time, he’s got to know the guys, he knows our business, he knows how we operate. He knows the product, but he always knows how to apply it back to a business case.

I deal with the business owners. It’s really important that when we get an opportunity to talk to that person, we know what’s important to them. Whether it is a social issue or something in their business, we know how to apply it back to something that’s meaningful to them.

Co-selling is a successful strategy

Vicky Bizos, Staples: My top five accounts nationally are with Lenovo. We go in all the time together. We never see the client by ourselves. We come into the client and have that meaningful discussion about us bringing Staples, Lenovo, finance all together, and really show that value add that we’re bringing into the client.

It’s been really successful, especially with Lenovo. The clients are seeing it and they love the partnership. That’s the bonus, getting that feedback, and continuing the journey with them.

Customers can save money by going mobile

Martin Kosasih, Virtunet: One of our key focuses in the last couple of years was mobility and transforming people from their desk-bound work styles into a mobile workforce. We’ve successfully done that with a couple of our larger corporate clients.

We migrated 1,500 staff from desk-bound staff to hot desk, activity-based workspaces. It was a very successful project. They saved a huge amount in real estate – they found that 30 percent of their staff members are not at their desk all the time. That’s a very good selling case for us to use.

On top of that, their office has transformed. They’ve got street names for their corridors, people can dock into HDMI and present almost anywhere. The key message is mobility. People can work from wherever – internally, in the cafe area, and from home.

They’ve got an upgrade cycle of one-third of their machines every year, but this transformation made them change the whole fleet. They’re moving offices too. It wasn’t a short process. This whole activity-based workspace can be a bit of a gimmick sometimes. Then if you do it wrongly, no one will ever use that space, but if it’s done correctly… They did over six months of trials. We combined HR, infrastructure, operations, everyone into the project.

Workplace transformation projects open up new budgets

Michael Giusti, Harbour IT: I don’t see customers go through typical refresh cycles anymore. They’re looking for business opportunities when they can get budget.

We’ve been talking about mobility for a long time – five or six years, right? There has been a lot of office consolidation, particularly here in Sydney with Barangaroo. That’s created an opportunity to look at different ways of people working.

Now you have a locker, you don’t have a desk. Then the business needs to come up with an IT solution that’s going to enable that. That’s driven this desktop refresh. The budget isn’t necessarily coming out of the IT budget, the budget’s coming out of the office relocation money. We have had a lot of projects like that.

The HR team can drive device refreshes

John Hanna, Southern Cross Computer Systems: If your IT is talking directly to their IT, they’re more likely to want less change in their environment. More of our success has been with the business than it has with IT. It’s about having the devices ready, and then being able to engage with the business around how the devices can make a difference. Versus the IT guy, who’s going to look at the procurement costs.

Vicky Bizos, Staples: We don’t realise how much of a role HR is playing around retention. With one of our clients, people were leaving – they weren’t engaged anymore. They had a fleet for five to six years and had exhausted their hardware. The people were bored. People weren’t engaged anymore. Leading with something new and fresh, it was amazing what it did to the whole culture of the business. That was led from a HR perspective because people were walking out of the door.

End users expect consumer-like experiences from business devices

David Gulli, Thomas Duryea Logicalis: We’ve always had a very consultative background. One of the things that we’ve noticed about the end users at our customers is that people seem to ask, “Why not?” They go home, and they use a device that they usually use with touch, and then they go into the corporate environment and they expect the same thing.

That drives the conversation of, “OK, well you want a touch-enabled operating system. We can provide you that, and we can provide you with those cloud-enabled services in the background to get your files on any device.” It’s all just baked into Windows 10, so the story starts to make sense.

As an example, we’re going to a HR conference, and we’re not targeting IT. We’re targeting HR from an activity-based working point of view, saying, “Look at what you can enable in your workforce.” It’s not technology driven, it’s culture driven.

Staff retention can be a powerful force for device upgrades

Peter Garner, Microsoft: It’s great to hear that the conversations partners are having with more than just the IT departments of these organisations – with HR, or with marketing, or with business decision makers in general. It really feels like there’s a change in the dynamic between the employee and the company now. There’s much more expectation from the employee on the company. If they don’t get what they want, then they’re not going to stick around. They’re not going to do their best work, and ultimately, they’re going to leave.

When the conversation is with an IT decision maker versus a business decision maker for HR, for example, the conversation becomes a lot easier in terms of justifying the cost outlay of new technology. Those people can instantly see all the hidden costs of not upgrading technology, and the cost savings if you do.

We’ve seen a lot of customers where staff retention has become a key driver of their technology deployments. When they deploy new devices, and the solutions that wrap around that to allow mobile working and flexibility, they’re able to attract and retain the talent they need to drive the business. The cost of not doing that is way higher than the cost of the actual technology in the first place.

Windows 10 is bringing consumer and business experiences together

Michael Giusti, Harbour IT: People's personal devices haven’t traditionally been the same as their work devices. With Windows 10, we have a really nice product that gives all the nice features, in terms of the feel, the look, its functionality. Honestly, I’m personally dumping Apple. I’m happy to say that, because I think the Windows product is really nice. I now go home and I use my work PC, which has got all the same features that I was used to in other platforms.

I am also challenging the tablet part. I think I’m seeing more organisations move towards the traditional laptop, but they're touchscreens, they’re convertible laptops but you have still got a nice keyboard for writing.

Victoria Gertner, Datacom (pictured): We have one customer, 1,500 seats, and they’re all about trends. They’re a legal firm, and they want to be the leading firm with technology. They’re onto Windows 10. They’re working with multiple vendors to trial what’s the newest, coolest tablet to use. Detachable devices are trendier.

We like the option of having access to multiple devices. I like my phone. I do a lot of work on it. I like my laptop. I also like to have that detachable for when I travel. A lot of our customers are going through that, because our work is changing. It is so versatile these days; we’re on mobile a lot.

We have a lot of choices. A lot companies want to have that choice. Most of my customers are moving to have a mixed fleet, rather than just giving everyone laptops or just desktops. A lot of customers are also adapting multiple vendors into this piece. We’re seeing that no one vendor does everything right, and there’s no perfect device.

Consumer devices do not always suit enterprise needs

Jason King, ASI Solutions: One of my clients is a New South Wales government agency. I won’t name them, but they’ve got a very big drive to mobility. They’re changing all their offices, they’re getting rid of the traditional systems.

Everyone loves the latest features and a consumer-type experience – the best, the latest. But some of these government clients still want enterprise-grade. They want something that they can get longevity out of. It doesn’t have to be two years, but at least 12 months.

What I’m seeing from a lot of the vendors is that they bring a product out, but six months later it’s gone, it’s replaced by something different, its feature sets have changed, it doesn’t have what it used to. The SOE [standard operating environment] has to change. This came directly from the CIO of this government department. He said: “I consider all these two-in-one type devices now as a consumer-grade. Nobody’s building one for enterprise.”

That’s a discussion I’m having now with the vendors of choice. The time frames of these devices are becoming shorter and shorter. A desktop, you could nearly guarantee 18 months to two years' longevity out of a product. Now you’re talking anywhere from three to nine months maximum, and then the product gets replaced.

Some of these enterprises are worried about because yes, they want their staff to have the latest, but what are they going to do in three months' time when that gets replaced? What will they put in next?

Martin Kosasih, Virtunet: One of the services we offer is IT asset life cycle management. We’re finding this is a problem with a lot of the two-in-ones. But the end users are actually the decision makers at the end of the day. They want to get all these new technologies, and IT has got their hand tied and just have to provide it. The challenges are very obvious, but IT’s just flowing with it. They’re making do for what the users want.

Healthcare is a big opportunity for mobility

Jason King, ASI Solutions: Healthcare is definitely heading toward tablet-based devices or convertible two-in-ones. There are a lot of tests happening at the moment. Is there an ideal product? I don’t think there is yet, depending on the hospital system.

For nurses, tablets or lightweight mobile devices have it there. They have what used to be called a 'computer on wheels', now we call them workstation on wheels. There’s been a change in getting the device as close to the nurse. I think tablets will be the next step. They’ve tried notebooks and there are still issues. I think they want to move to a tablet device – something with a long battery life, that they don’t have to go back and charge it after two or three hours.

Vicky Bizos, Staples (pictured): Apart from nurses' stations and theatres, we’re even going to the catering staff. Anything that has a pen to paper-type function is slowly now moving into that digital space.

We did a rollout with the catering staff at a particular hospital, and it was amazing – the uptake, the quickness. That is then leveraged out to other departments within the hospital in general to move that way. The traditional desktop has really evolved, especially with this particular client.

Availability of trial devices can seal the deal

Victoria Gertner, Datacom: Customers are so much more educated these days. Half the time, they know stuff quicker than I do. It is important for vendors to have trial devices ready, because the quicker your seed your trail devices into a customer, the more time they get to play with it, then the quicker you can sell them to it.

It’s just like people when they buy cars. It’s usually the first couple of cars that they try that they’re hooked on. Customers are getting quite educated and usually they come ready, with the research done already on what they want.

Baked-in security is a selling point

Daniel Goffredo, Microsoft: End point security – or security in general – is what we lead with. It’s the bread and butter. I have conversations with different sectors. One of those sectors is the financial sector. I was speaking a customer and they had 167 vendors they managed in security alone.

The question we thing posed is, “What about the end-point?” They’re a Windows 7 fleet. We ran a few examples. We have materials that are available to share as part of your own conversations to customers.

If someone gets through all your firewalls, and all your security, and it’s on the device, Windows 10 can identify the threat, quarantine it, and get rid of it.

The corporate SOE can be a drag on transformation

James Mercer, Fujitsu: Most of our customers are large enterprise customers. The real blocker is the corporate SOE [standard operating environment]. That blocks a lot of things, including picking lots of devices, because more devices, they don’t all like the same SOE. We’ve become advocates of Gartner called bimodal IT. Get the people who can onto the fast stuff and then don’t let the guys stuck on a highly secure SOE hold back the whole organisation. Traditionally we’d wait till everyone was ready before we did the transformation.

There’s a big impact there. How do you now manage a vanilla Windows 10 SOE as opposed to a Fujitsu-managed Windows 10 SOE? We’re just at the start of that change now. That’s where Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite comes in. We use that Microsoft tool to manage the SOE and we no longer get revenue from managing a SOE. It’s actually a fundamental change for systems integrators.

Stephen Watson, AC3: I’ve got one of the new HP Elite X3s with Windows 10 – it's a very sexy phone. When you talk about end-point protection, and you talk about SOEs, and all the rest of it, it’s a Windows 10 device. You take that device in, and you plug it in when you get to work. Now it’s your workstation. Now you’ve got a SOE that is a BYOD device. It’s an external outside device that you can now use within the corporate environment as well.

James Mercer: The traditional IT world would take that Windows 10, and blast it away. They'd take the features out, take the video out, the camera out, and they’d take the biometrics out. We would actually remove innovation. It was a weird thing.

Line-of-business buyers want true productivity

John Hanna, SCCS: The challenge for us as integrators is being able to move that conversation to the business. We’re all well versed on the bits and bytes, we’re all well versed on amortisation and refresh cycles. We’ve got to probably spend more time truly understanding the productivity gains and benefits of more than the device, and even mobility as a concept. Really understand the product suite inside Windows 10, and how that unleashes the business.

They’re the kinds of conversations pre-sales architects should start to have now, versus where I still think they are. We’re having great conversations with business, or the business units, but not necessarily leading them. They’re asking us questions, and we’re responding about Skype, or we’re responding about OneNote. Whereas we need to be able to be able to package these up and say, “Hey, let me show what the promised land looks like around productivity.”

Security is critical but it's a barrier to utilisation

James Mercer, Fujitsu: Corporate IT really only exists to deliver secure access to applications and data, otherwise, you could have off-the-shelf devices. A massive trend is obviously increased security. We’re not in an environment where we can be lax about security now – if anything, it’s like laser focus especially if you are the CIO or the head security officer. That’s why there’s been so much extra research and development of security enhancements to the Windows 10 package, and how that can integrate with biometrics.

The thing with security is you want it to have as little impact as possible to log on. A good example now is the biometrics with Windows 10 devices, because it uses your face. It’s fast and effective.

Security is a critical part of enterprise IT. You’ve got to make it as seamless as possible to have people on board, because people don’t want blockers. Whatever device they’re coming on, they want to quickly get on. In the virtual space, a real barrier has always been the logon process, to download this thing and put in their credentials to get in. The quicker you can remove barriers to log on securely, the more you get people on board.

Ultimately, with IT, you want people to be fans of your service. If you bring in a new service, like Windows 10, you want people to feel like it’s a massive uplift and a really positive thing so that they volunteer to come onto it. Then the migration is not six months, like planned, it’s three months. That’s the golden way to get a successful integration.

Biometrics are finally becoming easy and this improves IT support calls

Daniel Goffredo, Microsoft: As a community, we’ve been selling devices with biometrics for years. They’ve never been used, or they’ve been seen as a blocker – “I don’t want to put that on because if an employee leaves I have to try and work out how to reset it.”

Windows 10, we started to look at ways to enhance that hardware and have it on a common platform. If you are HP, Dell, whichever vendor, it’s common so the IT department doesn’t have to reset the actual biometrics. The research that we have is that one-third of calls coming into IT are to reset passwords, or help with security and access rights.

CRN: Windows Hello uses facial recognition to log in. What's the feedback been like?

David Gulli, TDL: It’s wow factor moment. It’s a futuristic thing where you can look at a computer, it recognises your face, whether you’ve got a beard or not – it’s infrared, right – and then log you in.

It’s such a wow moment for customers as well, to the point where they’ll pick up their iPhone, and they’ll use the biometric thing with thumb, and they’ll be like, “Oh, I have to press with my thumb, it kind of doesn’t work.” On Windows 10, you just look at the device, and it knows it's you. It’s really a wow factor thing.