Cold-calling and not listening among top channel gripes

CRN's IT Buyers Guide report shows a lack of basic customer understanding from the modern-day channel sales force

How well do you really know and understand your customers?

And more importantly is the sales message that management think is being used by their sales teams actually getting through to the clients?

Or are their teams getting carried away with jargon and trying to impress customers with technical knowledge, and forgetting the whole point of their objective as a trusted IT advisor - which is to make the working lives of their customers easier through the IT solutions they sell them.

If the results of CRN’s recent IT Buyers Guide report are anything to go by, there is still a lot of learning to be done and a definite lack of communication between management and their respective field teams.

We questioned over 350 end users from public sector and private firms of all sizes, along with over 100 financial directors from a similar mix of firms, to find out what their perceptions of the channel actually were.

Vendors are also just as guilty of not listening – and the report identifies the need for them to rethink their channel approach to ensure their partners are representing them correctly in front of customers.

It will not make easy reading for some. End users have been painstakingly honest about their main channel gripes and why some of them have been put off using the channel completely.

In this first of its kind report, we also asked VARs to answer questions on how THEY thought they were perceived by their customers. This enabled us to get a 360 degree view of the full sales cycle.

How far off the mark were those respondents?

There is only one way to find out this information, along with plenty more, including what end users are spending their upcoming IT budgets on, and how much budget firms of varying sizes dedicate to different IT needs, including maintenance, new initiatives, hardware and software.

Alan Loader, publisher of CRN, said: “By reading this report you will be able to spot pitfalls to avoid, what message your company should be sending out to customers and how to get the best out of your sales teams.”

To find out more abuot the Buyers Guide, contact [email protected]