I am attending smb nation in las vegas this weekend and it has been a great show. I will be presenting a little bit later today, and I will post my comments here with a link to the slide deck.
Yesterday I was lucky enough to sit in on two great presentations that sparked an addition to my presentation. Here are some notes:
Yesterday I was lucky enough to sit in on two great presentations that sparked an addition to my presentation. Here are some notes:
Anurag Agrawal in his presentation about mobility and SMB:
Top three issues for SMB customers:
- Reduce Operating Costs
- Enter New Markets
- Improve the Effectiveness of Sales and Marketing
Dave Michels in his presentation about Voice: Voice is an IT service now
I thought these points were notable because we are seeing the same thing in our business. In IT it is easy to think we are all about the technology, but in fact, the customers don't care about technology, they care about the growing their businesses. If we want to sell technology we have to answer the question: "...yes but, what does that do to grow my business?"
Some will say that this is solution selling and we have been doing that forever. I agree, but sometimes the solutions we are selling take on a life of their own, and get too far away from growing our customer's businesses.
In the case of Dave Michels comment -- "Voice is an IT service now", the point is again that the customer does not care that telephone systems used to be sold and supported by different people. The customer just wants to grow their business. There are many big things that phones can do now and someone needs to be bringing those things to the SMB market.