Insight UK: Our sales staff are embracing cloud

Insight boss Emma de Sousa claims recent cloudy commission rejig has 'bedded in'

Insight's UK managing director Emma de Sousa has insisted the company's sales staff are now embracing the opportunity to sell cloud technology.

Back in June, CRN revealed Insight was in the process of rejigging its commission structure to better incentivise staff to sell cloud kit.

At the time, some suggested Insight sales staff were not thrilled at the change. The move came as cloud becomes increasingly important in vendors' strategies – Microsoft announced in the summer that its rebate and incentives in the year ahead will be increasingly cloud focused.

But speaking to CRN, Insight's de Sousa (pictured) said staff are enthusiastic about the cloud opportunity.

"We've made some other changes internally to further support, encourage and incentivise those [sales staff] to focus on solutions sales around commission changes, which have now bedded into the organisation," she said. "We acknowledge that in order to take value to our customers, we have to have this style of conversation. I think it is fair to say that internally, people are embracing it and the training is paying off. We're starting to have more and more cloud conversations with our customers."

She said that on top of the commission changes, staff have been trained and supported in a variety of ways to support their new cloud-focused sales techniques.

"We've done a few things to help them – the first one is around training and development because, I guess, this is something new," she said. "But for anyone who has been in technology and technology sales for a length of time, there are always new things coming to market. Maybe not as big as cloud, but they're used to change and talking about new technology.

"So I think people accept that cloud is a way forward and they know that to remain strategically relevant to customers, they need to be having that kind of conversation. As a business, we've seen it as imperative to train and educate our people to be able to have that style of conversation."

De Sousa said investing in sales staff has been a key focus over the past few months, and will continue over the next year. The firm is currently on a "significant recruitment drive" to attract new talent, but she insisted Insight still wants to nurture its current employees.

"We have a sales academy which we are investing in to take our existing sales organisation on that journey with us," she said. "[We need] to upskill those sales teammates to have credible strategic conversations with our customers – to sit in front of C-level executives to talk about their business goals and objects and to come away and work with the solutions team and say 'how can we build an IT solution to help them get there?'. It's about attracting new talent... and about training and development and upskilling the existing sales team."

Surfacing competition

At its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in July, Microsoft announced the expansion of its Surface strategy. About 4,500 partners globally will soon be able to sell the kit, compared with just 150 who were able to before the announcement – one of which was Insight.

De Sousa admitted the move to let other VARs in on the action would make the industry more competitive.

"Yes, we were one of the original distributors and we had phenomenal success with that," she said. "It is a key focus for us; it is fantastic technology. It becomes more competitive now they have opened up the channel, but it doesn't change the way we go to market with that device. We are agnostic, so we work with customers to work out what's the best technology solution or device for them.

"We have had phenomenal success with Surface and interestingly, at WPC, they launched Surface Hub. We sold the very first Surface Hub in the UK and we have a substantial pipeline for the Surface Hub as well – particularly in the public sector space."